Recounts and Partisan Bickering Tire Washington Voters
BY SARAH KERSHAW and ELI SANDERS

New York Times  December 26, 2004

SEATTLE, Dec. 25 - Washington voters, confused by the bizarre turn of events in the excruciatingly close race for governor after more than seven weeks of vote counting, legal wrangling and partisan battling, are starting to sound quite flustered.

"Drop it all, start over and make sure everything's working right," said Eric Wimble, 35, of Monroe, who said he voted for Dino Rossi, the Republican who held the lead after the Nov. 2 election by 261 votes and after a recount by 42 votes, but lost a hand recount, mired in error and chaos, that was completed on Thursday. By that count, he lost by 130 votes.

Those results are virtually certain to be contested by the Republicans, prompting one Seattle newspaper columnist, Robert L. Jamieson Jr. of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, to declare, "All Washington State wants for Christmas is a new governor."

"I just kind of feel like, by the time they figure out who is governor, it'll be time for another election," said Daniel Warren, 19, of Monroe, who also identified himself as a Rossi supporter. "They need to hurry."

Tim Lundquist, 48, a Seattle schoolteacher who said he voted for the Democrat, Christine O. Gregoire, said he was pleased that his candidate seemed to have won but well aware that finality was still elusive.

"Where does it stop?" Mr. Lundquist said. "If this were another country, we would be asking NATO to come in and count these votes because we can't seem to get it right."

And Washington voters from other countries said their heads were spinning.

"This is America," said Yosief Beraki, 38, a Seattle cabdriver originally from Eritrea. "This is not Africa or Eritrea. What's going on here?"

Then there is Margaret Davis, 78, of Kent, who was having a more existential response, saying that what feels to many here like the election that would never end should be decided by a higher power.

"You might think I'm crazy," Ms. Davis said, "but I gave it up to the Lord, and I want him to put in office who is supposed to be there. I feel the person who is supposed to be the winner will be the governor, but I'm not saying who that is."

Other voters said the close results and newly found and erroneously rejected ballots here in King County, the state's most populous and strongly Democratic county, made them deeply suspicious of the integrity of the election process and left them wondering if the results from previous close elections were accurate.

In the governor's contest, Ms. Gregoire, 57, the state attorney general, had been favored to win comfortably, but as her opponent surged in the final days of the campaign he managed to prevail by one of the narrowest margins in state history, 261 votes. The closeness of the contest led to an automatic statewide machine recount, which put Mr. Rossi, 45, a former state senator and real estate agent, ahead by only 42 votes.

Democrats then requested a second recount, which they are entitled to under the law, this one by hand.

It was during that recount, which began in early December, that King County elections officials announced that they had erroneously rejected 573 ballots because election workers failed to locate their signatures on registration cards on file. Then King County elections officials, who have been criticized for mistakes in this and previous elections, said they had found an additional 150 ballots that had not been counted at all.

The county went to court to have those ballots included in the tally during the hand recount, and ultimately won their case in the State Supreme Court last week. That was a major victory for Democrats because until those votes were allowed, Ms. Gregoire was ahead in the hand recount by only 10 votes. Even with the final recount allowed under the law putting her ahead by 130 votes out of almost 3 million cast, it was one of the closest elections in the nation's history.

Juliya Golant, 23, voted for the first time on Nov. 2, for Ms. Gregoire, and hers was one of the 573 disputed ballots in King County, according to election records that made public the names of the 573 voters.

Ms. Golant said that she received notice that election officials had trouble verifying her signature and that Democratic Party election workers had tried to contact her five or six times to have her complete an affidavit showing her signature was valid.

"My signature has always been the same," she said.

"They came back every weekend, until they caught me at my house last weekend," Ms. Golant said. She said she did not know if her vote had ultimately been counted because not all of the 573 ballots were deemed valid in King County, but she did find herself wondering if she could trust a system that had such problems and in which the results were so close and then turned upside down.

"The system begins to lose credibility," said Ms. Golant, who lives in Shoreline and works in an optometry office. "Because when it has to be recounted and recounted and then it's challenged and has to be recounted again, really, is it a popularity contest or is it an actual system that works?"

She added: "Realistically, I think that what most people want is for the person being nominated to just do the job. When there's this much holdup in who the person is, I think issues get lost. I think they should figure it out and move on. It would be nice to know who the governor is, and it would be nice for them to start doing their job."