GOP will contest found ballots
Republicans are disputing up to 595 discovered ballots King County officials now want to count.

By Jerry Cornfield
Herald Writer

A pivotal hearing this afternoon in King County should decide the fate of hundreds of newly found ballots - and possibly the outcome of the governor's race.

Republican Party lawyers will contest King County Auditor Dean Logan's attempt to include as many as 595 ballots in the hand recount now under way, adding any votes on them to the final totals.

Governor's race recount What happened: The state Supreme Court unanimously rejected the Democratic Party's petition to reconsider about 3,000 invalidated ballots in the hand recount of the governor's race. Tuesday night, 22 more uncounted ballots were found in King County, in addition to the 573 already found. Status: By Tuesday, Republican Dino Rossi was leading by 106 votes in the hand recount. Today: The King County Canvassing Board meets this afternoon to determine the fate of the new ballots. The canvassing board is expected to include all the validated ballots in the hand recount.  
They're gravely concerned that those votes will heavily favor Democrat Christine Gregoire and ultimately help snatch victory from Republican Dino Rossi, who has emerged as the winner in two prior vote counts.

He won the Nov. 2 election by 261 votes and held a 42-vote lead after a mandated machine recount. By Tuesday he had gained 64 votes in the hand recount.

Rossi said Tuesday he wants the circumstances surrounding the ballots fully investigated.

"It's just too much of a coincidence. They just keep coming up with votes and it has never benefited me," he said. "We're not going to take anything lying down. I'll guarantee you that."

King County election officials said the uncounted ballots were wrongly rejected because signatures on each did not match computerized registration records. Hard copy records needed to be checked but were not.

The three-member King County Canvassing Board meets at 3 p.m. to decide how to proceed.

Democrats want the ballots tallied and said their discovery underscores why they sued in the state Supreme Court to require all previously rejected provisional and absentee ballots statewide be re-examined.

"The whole purpose of the recount was to find mistakes and correct them," Gregoire said. "Thank God King County found this mistake now instead of two weeks from now."

The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected the Democrats' legal plea, upholding the state recount law and the way it is administered by election officials and canvassing boards in the state's 39 counties.

The Democratic Party suit had been opposed by Rossi, the Republican Party and the Secretary of State's Office.

In its five-page ruling, the high court iterated that in a recount "ballots are to be 'retabulated' only if they have been previously counted or tallied" subject to exercise of the law's "safety valve" clause.

That clause empowers canvassing boards to correct errors when information shows "there was just a mistake," said attorney Thomas Ahearne, who argued before justices Monday on behalf of the Secretary of State's Office.

Today's showdown in King County is the latest entanglement between election officials and the state Republican Party. During the machine recount, the party sued to keep ballots that the machines could not read from being tallied. A federal judge denied that claim.

Snohomish County expects to finish recounting its votes by noon today, said County Auditor Bob Terwilliger.

All but 27 of the county's 698 precincts had been done by Tuesday. Five teams, each consisting of a Democrat and a Republican, will complete the counting. The results won't be posted until the election is certified by the county canvassing board Thursday afternoon.

Additional teams finished Tuesday verifying the tally of about 96,000 votes cast Election Day on touch-screen electronic machines. They checked results stored in two places on each of the 937 devices in use that day and confirmed the numbers remained as reported election night, Terwilliger said.

Meanwhile, two members of the federal Election Assistance Commission are scheduled to visit counting centers in Snohomish and King counties today. The bipartisan agency was formed by the Help America Vote Act, which was passed by Congress after the controversial presidential election in 2000.