07:27 AM PST on Wednesday, November 17, 2004

Associated Press

SEATTLE — A judge ruled Tuesday that King County should continue counting provisional ballots, despite protests from Republicans.

Superior Court Judge Dean Lum refused to grant a temporary restraining order against the state’s largest county, a stronghold of support for Democratic gubernatorial candidate Christine Gregoire.

The ruling affects less than 1,000 ballots, but the governor’s race is so close that those ballots could make a huge difference. On Tuesday afternoon, Republican Dino Rossi led Gregoire by just 19 votes, out of 2.8 million ballots cast.

“This is an important ruling,” Democratic Party Chairman Paul Berendt said. “The judge said that every vote should count.”

The judge also chided both parties for dragging the election into court.

“Everyone would agree that Court is not the proper place to decide an election, yet this has not stopped both Republicans and Democrats from rushing to Court at the last minute, seeking emergency restraining orders and injunctions, claiming all sorts of improprieties by the other side,” Lum wrote.

Provisional ballots are used when people show up to vote at the polls and their names aren’t on the list of registered voters. If election workers can later match the provisional ballot signature to the signature of a registered voter, then they count that ballot.

Last week the state Democratic Party went to court to get the names of 929 voters whose provisional ballots were going to be disqualified because their signatures didn’t match. On Monday, Berendt turned in signed affidavits from 400 of those voters — affirming they were legally registered voters who only voted once — and King County officials said they would count those ballots.

That’s when the GOP cried foul. State Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance said the county shouldn’t determine that ballots are legitimate based solely on signatures collected by party workers.

“The potential for fraud is great if they are going to rely on affidavits collected by partisan campaign workers,” Vance said Tuesday.

Democrats heaped scorn on the Republicans.

“Going to court to stop ballots from being counted is disgraceful,” Berendt said. “Rossi knows that Chris Gregoire will be the next governor if every vote is counted.”

Morton Brilliant, Gregoire’s campaign spokesman, called Vance’s tactic “a shameful and sad way to try to win this race.”

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels said, “We live in King County, not Broward County (Florida). Let’s count every vote.”

Vance said he, not Rossi, decided to pursue legal action. He said elections officials need to make sure that ballots were actually cast by registered voters: “And the only way to do that is to either match the signature to what they have on file or require the voter to come in person to the King County elections office and confirm that they cast the ballot.”

Vance acknowledged that the Republican Party is now doing the same thing as the Democrats, trying to round up affidavits from Rossi voters whose provisional ballots are in danger of being disqualified.

“We are now — we never imagined this was legal,” Vance said. But if it is, he said, “we’ve got to protect ourselves.”