Razor-thin race for Washington lands commissioner spurs first statewide ballot recount in decades

As of Tuesday evening, a margin of 51 votes separated two of the leading candidates in the closest statewide race Washington state has seen in 20 years.

Three candidates for state lands commissioner are fighting neck and neck for two spots on the November general election ballot.

Two weeks after the Aug. 6 primary, the close election results have triggered an automatic statewide hand recount.

Since the Aug. 6 primary, the gap between Democrat Dave Upthegrove and Republican Sue Kuehl Pederson has narrowed significantly, and elections officials say a statewide ballot recount will almost certainly happen.

As of 6 p.m. Tuesday, King County Councilmember Upthegrove held a 51-vote lead – that’s 0.0064% of the total vote – over Kuehl Pederson, a former power analyst and natural resource officer.

Upthegrove and Kuehl Pederson are competing to secure the second-place title in the race and join Republican Jaime Herrera Beutler on November’s general election ballot.

Tuesday evening’s ballot tallies showed Herrera Beutler, a former U.S. representative who represented Vancouver, maintained her slim first-place lead in the race with 22.03% of the total statewide votes counted. Upthegrove and Kuehl Pederson Pederson trailed close behind, practically tied for second place with 20.82% of the vote each.

With such a close race, it’s likely that every county in the state will have to recount its Aug. 6 primary ballots by hand, Washington state Director of Elections Stuart Holmes said. As of Tuesday, the secretary of state’s office had not formally called for a recount, but officials expect the announcement to show up later in the week.

“Right now, it’s statistically unlikely that we wouldn’t be doing a manual recount,” Holmes said in a phone interview Friday afternoon. “For simplicity’s sake, it’s essentially a hand count of the entire contest.”

Washington law mandates that elections with final vote margins smaller than a quarter of a percent will be automatically recounted by hand. The Secretary of State’s Office is expected to certify the results on Thursday morning and direct all counties to begin a manual recount shortly after.

“This is a historically close race, whether you’re looking at primaries or general elections,” Holmes said.

The statewide recount process is expected to take one week once it begins, Holmes said. What will happen is each county’s elections office will retrieve all of its Aug. 6 primary ballots from storage and separate them into precinct piles.

Elections workers in teams of two will begin tallying, by hand, the results for the commissioner of public lands race. If the first hand count doesn’t match up with the originally reported count, elections workers will recount the pile by hand. If the second hand count does not match the first hand count, the election workers at hand will be excused and the pile of ballots will be counted by a separate team.

It’s been 20 years since a statewide Washington race was close enough to require a recount. In 2004, Democrat Christine Gregoire barely clinched the race for governor by 133 votes over Dino Rossi after two recounts.

Regardless of party, the two candidates who come out on top after the recount in the primary race will advance to the Nov. 5 ballot.

Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton said hand recounts are a pretty standard practice in her office.

“Considering how many of them we’ve done over the years, it’s going to look pretty similar to what we’ve done over the years,” Dalton said.

“We’re very skilled at hand recounts.”

The Spokane County Canvassing Board is scheduled to meet later in the week to begin planning for the recount. On Monday, elections workers will begin pulling boxes of ballots off of the storage shelves, Dalton said. There will be between eight and 10 teams of two counting at a time until they get through all the voting precincts.

When the latest state vote count was released Tuesday, Upthegrove sent out a campaign statement celebrating his 51-vote victory.

“I am incredibly thankful for the hundreds of volunteers who worked with our campaign this past week to help voters fix issues with their ballots so that their votes would count,” Upthegrove wrote.

In a phone interview later that evening, Upthegrove said his campaign manager pulled two all-nighters compiling lists of Democratic voters with ballots that weren’t counted due to signature mismatches or other errors. His campaign sent the addresses of said voters to some 350 volunteers who went knocking door-to-door and encouraged voters to take steps with their local elections office to ensure their votes were counted.

Moving forward, Upthegrove said his campaign will closely monitor the recount.

“I’ve hired an elections attorney mostly to guide me through it, make sure our interests are represented and that we understand what is happening,” Upthegrove said.

Kuehl Pederson did not immediately respond to a request for comment Tuesday afternoon.

Ballots for the Nov. 5 general election will be mailed to Washington voters in two months. Besides the race for lands commissioner, voters will select candidates for president, U.S. senate, governor and attorney general, U.S. House seats, state House and Senate positions, county commission and other offices. They also will consider state initiatives.

The state Commissioner of Public Lands serves a four-year term and oversees Washington’s massive Department of Natural Resources – an agency in charge of nearly 6 million acres of forests, beaches and other public lands.

The commissioner also runs all firefighting efforts on state-managed lands.