Parties scramble for precious last votes
SEATTLE — Democratic and Republican activists spent a lot of time on the phone over the weekend, calling voters who cast provisional ballots that are in dispute.
People on each side of the gov-ernor’s race are hoping that getting every last vote counted will help their candidate win.
Republican Dino Rossi has a lead of 1,920 votes over Democrat Christine Gregoire. About 42,000 ballots still have to be counted — roughly 11,000 of them in King County.
Election results will be certified Wednesday. A recount is automatic if the margin of victory is less than 2,000 votes.
Democrats started calling Friday evening after a court victory that gave them access to King County’s list of provisional voters. King County Superior Court Judge Dean Lum’s ruling forced the county to release the names of 929 voters whose ballots had been rejected because of mismatched or missing signatures.
Provisional ballots are used when people vote outside their regular polling place, when there are questions about someone’s voting eligibility or when voters who asked for absentee ballots don’t get them.
Democrats were focusing on provisional and absentee voters in King County, where most votes counted so far have gone to Gregoire.
“We are calling the folks whose ballots were rejected and then we’re going to their homes trying to help them to get their votes to count,” said Paul Berendt, Democratic Party state chairman.
Republicans also worked to contact voters, with volunteers staffing phone banks at the state party headquarters, Rossi’s headquarters and other offices across the state.
“It’s almost like the election never ended,” state GOP Chairman Chris Vance told the Associated Press on Sunday. “We were doing phone banks reminding voters to vote, then we shifted over to people who forgot to sign their absentee ballots” and now it’s the problematic provisional ballots.
Lois Ann Thurman-Burnell said she was pleased Democratic Party volunteers contacted her, letting her know that the signature on her ballot — which read “L. Ann Thurman-Burnell” — didn’t match the one on her voter registration card — which has her full name.
Volunteers left a note at her door asking her to call them by Monday if she wanted her vote to be counted. She called on Saturday, and the canvassers returned and helped her fill out the forms.
“I was glad that they were coming back out to make sure that people’s votes were being counted,” Thurman-Burnell said.
Neither party had estimates of how many voters had been contacted.
As of Friday, when the most recent batch of ballots were counted, the tally was 1,347,865 votes for Rossi, 1,345,945 for Gregoire, and 61,349 for Libertarian Ruth Bennett.