Pierce County left out 50 valid ballots in vote

TACOMA – Pierce County failed to count 50 valid ballots in the 2004 election, Auditor Pat McCarthy revealed during a deposition this week.

McCarthy answered questions under oath for eight hours in one of many depositions taken by Republican and Democratic party attorneys preparing for a May 23 trial in the gubernatorial election challenge.

Republican Dino Rossi is contesting the 129-vote election victory of Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire, who won a hand recount of 2.9 million ballots after Rossi had won the first two tallies.

Republicans are focusing their challenge on the Democratic stronghold of King County, where officials have acknowledged mistakes that allowed some illegal votes to be counted while some valid votes were not counted. But attorneys from both parties are questioning election officials across the state as well.

Pierce County election workers had copied the 50 ballots so they could be read by vote-counting machines, McCarthy said. They were part of a group of 30,000 ballots that couldn’t be read by machines even though voters made their intent clear. The 50 valid, uncounted ballots were discovered in December, McCarthy said, after the final hand recount had been certified.

Rossi won Pierce County by 51 percent.

Earlier this month, McCarthy revealed that election workers had found 14 other uncounted ballots while sorting through election materials.

Pierce County also counted 164 unverified provisional ballots, though the county has since determined that all but 26 belonged to registered voters.

McCarthy noted that Pierce County voters cast about 317,000 ballots in the last election, so the mistakes represent a small part of the total.