Grant County prepares for hand recount in Governor's race

EPHRATA — The third round of counting in the Washington Governor's race begins Monday in Grant County, but officials have already started preparing for that hand recount.

The elections staff of Grant County began sorting ballots into each of the county's 65 different precincts Thursday morning, and Auditor Bill Varney is allowing two days for sorting before two days of scheduled counting next week.

Statewide, Republican candidate Dino Rossi leads by just 42 votes to Democrat candidate Christine Gregoire following an automatic machine recount last month.

The race isn't quite as close in Grant County, where more than two thirds of the county's 26,220 voters cast their votes for Rossi on Nov. 2. Rossi received 17,385 votes and 67.6 percent of the vote to Democratic Candidate Christine Gregoire's 7,800 votes and 30.33 percent of the vote. Libertarian Candidate Ruth Bennett received 534 votes in Grant County, or

slightly more than two percent.

Representatives from both Democrat and Republican parties are going to be on hand as observers for both the sorting and counting periods over the next week.

Varney said he is unsure how long the count may take, but said there is a possibility of the count being finished in one day.

"It's hard to predict how long it's going to take us to do it," Varney said.

Varney has allotted as many as four days for the process including time for both sorting and counting of votes, and he said he wants to take the time to do it right.

Vote re-counters will be the same workers that worked at polling places on election night, and some of them have had to count votes by hand before. Varney said some of the recount workers have been working at the polls during elections for almost 50 years and were working when the votes had to be counted by hand.

The count itself will be broken down with 10 different counting tables, each with three counters who will be counting, verifying and observing the process. Each table will also have two additional observers, one from each of the two major political parties.

Longtime Grant County Democrat Don McDowall is helping to organize volunteers from his party to be observers for the recount. He said that even if the machines are 99.99 percent accurate, a difference of 42 votes out of three million cast is just too small a margin to let the vote pass without a recount.

"I'm totally for it, every vote should be counted," said McDowall.

Thomas Dent said, however, that counting is the one thing that computers do better than people do. Dent is the Chairman of the Grant County Republican Party and he said the second recount is just putting people through a lot of work for a hand count that has up to a six percent error.

"It's not about counting votes," Dent said of the third count, "It's about finding a few more votes."

The count will be done on a precinct by precinct basis, and each of the count's 10 tables will each start with a precinct, and continue until all 65 are done. The count in each precinct varies, from approximately 100 votes in rural counties to 1,200 votes in city precincts.

Varney said the revenue and expenditures from the recount still have to be added to his added to Varney's budget for this year, however he said the political parties are the ones who are paying for this recount.

Ballot sorting itself is taking place in the Grant County Elections Office Thursday and Friday. The recount will start at 8:30 a.m. Monday in the Multi-Purpose Room of the Law and Justice Building of the Grant County Courthouse.