[link|http://www.seattleweekly.com/features/0501/050105_news_recount.php|Seattle Weekly]

Democrat Christine Gregoire was elected governor by 129 votes last month in the third tabulation of one of the closest elections in U.S. history. While many are skeptical about the outcome, I am not among them. I was there at the historic moment the last ballots were tallied. In fact, I personally counted those and more than 10,000 of the 900,000 other ballots cast in King County. Over two weeks, as a temporary county employee and Democratic Party designee, I also learned a thing or two about partisan holy war\ufffdand human nature. The Re-Recount of 2004 wasn't pretty, but the system worked as designed. The hand recount gave us the true winner: the voters.

Nice article from one of the hand recounters. She explains some of the games that went on, mostly by the republicans. But it is also clear from her article that these manuvers had little impact, if any, in the count at the bottom level.

The basic method is to create bundles of votes, which are then counted by one person from both sides. If the counts agree it is put into the record book and they move on. If they don't agree, they go through the stack to find the ones they disagree about. If they can't come to an quick conclusion of which side it should go in, it goes off to the full time supervisors. The article doesn't specifically say, but I get the impression that each bundle was given to multiple pairs of vote counters, which would be necissary for a good count.

For example, if a voter fills in the oval adjacent to Dino Rossi's name, then inexplicably colors in and circles the "R" denoting the candidate's political party and also fills in the write-in oval and writes the name "Dino 'the man' Rossi," like it or not, voter intent is pretty darn clear.

So even if the voter has technically over-voted, when the voter's intent is readily apparent, hand ballot counters are instructed to count it as a legitimate vote. It is indisputably the fairest way to honor voter intent. Rossi and Gregoire both picked up a large number of votes this way from ballots that otherwise would not have been counted, not only in King County but in counties statewide.

So the sudden flurry of over-votes identified by GOP counters that day was curious. Based on the voter-friendly interpretation of the rules, the incidence of over-votes should have been quite infrequent. Instinctively, I began to read aloud the candidate name for all over-votes identified by my GOP partner, so the observers would be made aware of how the game was being played: Designate as many Gregoire votes as you can as over-votes in an effort to get them thrown out.

Clearly, there was no concern for voter intent in this blatant practice. "Let me guess, it's a Gregoire vote," I'd say in vain hope of shaming my partner. Even smudges and stray spots of ink from other ballots were seen as fair in the GOP's over-votes game. It began to arouse the suspicions of observers. In an election as tight as this one, it was entirely feasible that such a strategy could make the critical difference between winner and loser. Within a day, the election officials got hip to the scheme and instructed all ballot counters to henceforth refer all over-votes to the canvassing board. In essence, the entire over-vote category was abolished. Clearly, this measure\ufffdalong with the burden it imposed on the canvassing board\ufffdwould not have been needed had the GOP refrained from conducting such an underhanded tactic.

This was apparently one of the bigger problems during the hand count. People that had done something more then color in the oval. The computer ballot counter kicks such votes out, but if the intent is clear then they are too be counted.

Jay