09:28 PM PST on Wednesday, December 15, 2004

From KING5.com Staff and Wire Reports

OLYMPIA, Wash. - Washington Republicans cried foul Wednesday, a day after King County elections officials said they found as many as 595 uncounted votes that may be added to the recount in the governor's race.

County officials said later that they would reconsider whether the ballots should be included.

Republican Dino Rossi won the Nov. 2 election over Democrat Christine O. Gregoire by 261 votes in the first count and by 42 after a machine recount.

A third, hand recount is now underway and the King County votes at issue could very easily flip the result of the election.

"We believe that none of these ballots should be counted," Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance said at a noon news conference Wednesday. If they are, Vance said, Republicans were preserving the option of going to court.

The Republicans' position contradicted the opinion of Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed, who has said it appears the votes can legitimately be added.

At issue are a total of 840 ballots, 573 that were identified as mistakenly disqualified because of invalid signatures, 22 ballots reportedly found at the bottom of several ballot machines and another 245 where the voter's intent must be determined by the canvassing board.

The King County canvassing board voted 2-1 Wednesday that the 573 votes will be given another look to determine whether they should be counted. The board postponed a decision on how to deal with the 22 ballots found inside unsecured voting machines.

The canvassing board's decision doesn't yet mean that the votes will necessarily be counted, and the canvassing board still has other contentious ballots to consider.

It's a two-step process. First, election workers will verify if the ballot signatures are those of registered voters. If so, workers will take the ballots out of their security envelopes and bring them back to the board for a final decision on whether they should be counted. The process will take several days.

Republicans also argue that the 573 votes should not be included based on a one-day old Supreme Court ruling on which votes should or should not be counted.

On Tuesday a Democratic Party petition to reconsider about 3,000 invalidated ballots in the manual recount of Washington’s closest-ever governor’s race was rejected unanimously by the state Supreme Court.

The court ruled that a recount should not include reconsideration of ballots that had been previously rejected by a county canvassing board.

Vance said that the 573 votes that were being considered by the King County canvassing board had, in fact, already been considered and should, therefore be thrown out in accordance with the Supreme Court's ruling.

King Council member Larry Philips, whose absentee ballot is among those in dispute, said it was wrong to say that the ballots had already been before the canvassing board.

"The opinion of the Supreme Court clearly does not apply," Philips said.

Democrats said the GOP's moves were hypocritical.

"Similar corrections have been going on all across the state. But now that the count isn't going their way, the GOP and Dino Rossi are screaming fraud in King County. They are doing everything they can to keep these ballots from being counted," State Democratic Chairman Paul Berendt said in a prepared statement.

Republicans stated their case to the canvassing board in a letter delivered Wednesday.

The letter seeks answers to several questions, including, how did the county discover the ballots, why did they go looking for ballots on the bottom of counting machines and why didn't some of the names of the 573 voters show up on previous lists of voters for whom there were signature problems?

"There's no way to know whether this is gross incompetence or corruption. There's no way for us to know," Vance said.

In the meantime, a Republican member of the King County Council has called for an emergency meeting to look into problems in the elections department.

David Irons says he hopes the council chairman will call a meeting no later than Friday.

Irons says "The wheels are falling off the cart at records and elections. We have to get to the bottom of this before we can provide confidence."

Rossi said Tuesday the newly discovered ballots should be thoroughly investigated.

“We believe if you do a fair and honest recount, we win,” he said.

“It’s just too much of a coincidence. They just keep coming up with votes, and it has never benefited me,” Rossi said. “We’re not going to take anything lying down, I’ll guarantee you that.”

Gregoire said the late discovery showed the system is working.

“The whole purpose of the recount was to find mistakes and correct them,” Gregoire said. “Thank God King County found this mistake now instead of two weeks from now.”

She repeated her belief that the race for governor is a “virtual tie,” adding that she’s cautiously optimistic she can win.

“I don’t think anyone can predict the outcome of the race,” Gregoire said. “I put my fate in the hands of the voters.”

The hand recount is expected to take until at least Dec. 22 to complete. The inauguration for governor is scheduled for Jan. 12.

After the latest developments Wednesday, former Republican Secretary of State Ralph Munroe said there's a real chance that the November election could be thrown out and a new election will have to be held in February.