Lead Tips to Democrat for Washington Governor
By SARAH KERSHAW  New York Times December 23, 2004

SEATTLE, Dec. 22 - After a bitter and protracted recount fight in the Washington governor's race, elections officials announced Wednesday that the Democratic candidate, Christine O. Gregoire, was leading her Republican opponent by 10 votes - a minuscule margin but a stunning reversal of the Nov. 2 election results. 
 
The preliminary results elated Democratic Party officials, and it came only hours after the party scored another victory, when the State Supreme Court agreed with the Democrats' contention that more than 700 newly discovered and erroneously disqualified ballots in heavily Democratic King County should now be considered.

Since those ballots came from a county where Ms. Gregoire, 57, already had a solid lead, the ruling could allow her to increase her extraordinarily tiny edge in a race that is the closest in state history and one of the closest in the nation's history.

The day's events dealt a serious blow to state Republicans and Dino Rossi, 45, a businessman and former state senator, who had been certified the winner of the Nov. 2 vote after eking out a margin of 261 votes out of almost three million cast. He later won a machine recount by 42 votes.

Official results from the manual recount will not be announced until Thursday, after King County, which includes Seattle, reviews the 723 disputed ballots. Republicans, who fought hard to keep those ballots out of the tally, were already vowing Wednesday to press election officials to consider several hundred other disqualified ballots cast in other counties.

Whatever the final results, they are almost certain to be contested.

"This count, this election, is not over," said Chris Vance, the chairman of the state Republican Party. The Supreme Court, he said, "basically threw the door open to start all over again. I think that's crazy."

He said Republicans planned to "show up at 9 a.m." on Thursday "on the doorstep of every county auditor with people whose votes weren't counted for Dino Rossi."

But the Democrats, who have waged an all-out war for their candidate in a state known more for politeness in politics than for the kind of partisan brawling that has dominated this contest, said they were confident that the recount had changed the outcome of a statewide election for the first time in state history.

"We are confident that she has been elected governor," said Paul Berendt, chairman of the state Democratic Party, who has encouraged Mr. Rossi to concede.

At a news conference Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Gregoire, looking upbeat for the first time since before the election, said she was not personally asking Mr. Rossi to concede. "I leave the decision about conceding to Mr. Rossi," she said.

Ms. Gregoire, the state attorney general, steered clear of proclaiming victory. "It is too early to declare victory; although we are ahead right now, there are still hundreds of votes left to be counted," she said.

Mr. Rossi did not comment on Wednesday, but a spokeswoman, Mary Lane, said, "Knowing how King County operates, it really is not over until the fat lady sings."

Under state law, if a second recount reverses the outcome of an election, the cost - in this case $730,000 - is then covered by the state. But the Democrats had raised almost $2 million from across the country to finance the effort, with help from Senator John Kerry and Howard Dean.

And in an election year that delivered Democrats so many bruising losses, the potential fall and rise of a Democrat in Washington would be a deliciously hard-won aberration.

Such an outcome would be a personal victory for Mr. Berendt, the state party chairman.

For the last few weeks, he has begun each morning with hard-charging confrontations on a 6 a.m. talk radio show with Mr. Vance, the Republican chairman, whom he described as a "friend" before the election.

"It's time for Democrats somewhere to draw a line in the sand and say we are not going to let bully Republican tactics determine who our governor is or how an election is going to be determined," he said.

Until the final days of the election, Ms. Gregoire had been favored to win easily in a state that has not elected a Republican governor since 1980. But Mr. Rossi, hammering the state's struggling economy, burst into the lead and ultimately won by 261 votes, such a slim margin that it triggered an automatic recount.

Mr. Berendt said Washington Democrats had decided from the start that what he described as Al Gore's "nice guy" approach was not to be the tactic here.
"I don't think there's any doubt that people are empowered by this whole thing," said Representative Jim McDermott, one of the state's most prominent Democrats. "The feeling of many of us is they quit too soon in Ohio. We don't know what happened there, but we said, 'By God, they're not going to do that in Washington.' "

The Democrats repeatedly went to court to challenge the Republicans. The party's communications director, Kirstin Brost, fired off a daily stream of news releases with biting words for Mr. Rossi, calling him a thief and the "accidental governor-elect" and deriding him for his "HypocRossi."

Meanwhile, the Republicans were accusing Democrats of doing the bullying, of refusing to accept Mr. Rossi's two victories and of stopping at nothing to turn the election around.

"I think what's going on more than anything is the realization that they could actually lose this race and that we would change what is happening in this state," said Diane Tebelius, a lawyer for the Washington Republican Party.

Mr. Vance said he thought Democrats, licking their wounds, were trying to make an example of Washington. "The Democrats have this perception that they didn't fight hard enough in Florida, they didn't fight hard enough in Ohio, and by God, this time they're going to go down fighting," he said.

But he said he thought the fight here would backfire.

"I think what they've done is they've alienated people in the state of Washington, and I think it's going to do long-term damage to the Democratic Party," he said.

The State Supreme Court, hearing an appeal of a case decided last week by a lower court, on Wednesday ruled that ballots that had been disqualified in King County because election workers initially found no matching signatures on voter registration cards in their files were not "fully examined." Republicans argued that King County was trying to "expand the universe of ballots" after the election and that it was too late to go back and correct errors. But the justices, who ruled for the Republicans in another case last week, this time threw tough questions at them.

"You're looking at it from the point of view of the winner or the loser," Justice Susan Owens said. "Shouldn't we be looking at it from the point of view of the voter?"

Caught in the middle of the fight was the secretary of state, Sam Reed, a Republican who went through his own recount in his re-election in 2000.

Mr. Reed's office sided with the Democrats and argued before the Supreme Court that the King County ballots should be counted, irking other members of his party. But the Democrats often said he would potentially be too sympathetic to the Republicans because of his party affiliation, he said.

Mr. Reed, who is expected to certify the results soon, said he fully expected them to be contested.

He added, "Election administrators often say, 'I don't care who wins, as long as someone wins.' "