Parties chase after every vote

By Judy Chia Hui Hsu
Times Snohomish County Bureau

KEN LAMBERT / THE SEATTLE TIMES Kristin Jacobsen, 24, a paid Christine Gregoire staffer, gives instructions to people taking maps and forms to find voters whose ballots are in question, yesterday in South Seattle.

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With the gubernatorial race still too close to call, the Democratic and Republican parties yesterday both chased voters who cast provisional ballots with signature problems.

Democrats, who began scrambling for votes in King County Friday night shortly after a judge ordered the county to disclose its list of provisional voters, mounted the larger effort.

They began calling voters at 6:30 Friday night, about an hour after the list was released, said Democratic Party Chairman Paul Berendt. By 10 a.m. yesterday, more than 100 Democratic volunteers were knocking on doors and working at phone banks.

Republican Dino Rossi leads Democrat Christine Gregoire by 1,920 votes in the governor's race. There are about 40,000 more ballots to count, approximately 11,000 of them in King County.

Election results will be certified Wednesday.

King County Superior Court Judge Dean Lum's ruling gave Democrats the names of 929 voters whose ballots had been rejected because of mismatched or missing signatures.

Provisional ballots are used when voters cast ballots outside their regular polling place or when there are uncertainties about someone's eligibility to vote. They also include voters who requested absentee ballots but didn't receive them.

Democrats are 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," Berendt said.

Ryan Bianchi, communications assistant for the Gregoire campaign, said the canvassers knock on doors and ask if the person is a Gregoire voter. "If they say no, we just tell them to have a nice day," he said. If they said yes, then they continued with the process.
 
A small group of Republicans was also calling voters yesterday. "We've got about five or 10 people making calls at the state party headquarters," said state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance. "We started making calls this morning."

Vance said his party is trying to find the Republicans on King County's list of provisional voters in order to phone them and urge them to correct their signatures on their ballots.

"I think this has been blown out of proportion," Vance said. "It's a tiny fraction of voters and it might yield either side a tiny fraction of votes — about 100 for either side — but it's worth doing."

From the Democratic perspective, the effort is critical.

"Clearly it's such a close race that what we're trying to do is find as many votes as possible," Bianchi said. "This is a rare situation where it can come down to a few votes, so we want to make sure that everybody who voted gets their vote counted."

Berendt spoke with volunteers before they fanned out around the county.

"I told them that they were all lionhearted for making such a wonderful commitment essentially 12 days after the polls had closed," he said. "I consider that a noble thing to do."

Armed with a stack of maps and forms, Cherisse Luxa of Burien headed out to White Center to knock on six people's doors. Wearing a Gregoire sticker on her coat, Luxa, who was a delegate to the Democratic National Convention this year, helped mobilize volunteers Friday night.

"When I found out that somebody's vote wasn't counted just because they didn't have a signature, I knew I had to get involved," she said. "My first big goal is that people's votes count, and my second goal is to make sure that Christine Gregoire gets elected."

Bianchi knocked on 15 doors in Ballard yesterday morning. He said he was surprised that people already knew about the ballot problems from watching TV or reading the newspaper.

"In one case, a man had a copy of the voter registration card ready to go so we could take it to the auditor's office," Bianchi said.

Lois Ann Thurman-Burnell said she was pleased to be contacted by Democratic Party volunteers yesterday. Thurman-Burnell, a resident of Capitol Hill who signs her name "L. Ann Thurman-Burnell," said the signature on her absentee ballot did not match her voter registration card on which her full name appears.

Volunteers had left a note at her door asking her to call them by Monday if she wanted her vote to be counted, Thurman-Burnell said. The canvassers returned shortly after she called 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. "I just hope that in the future we can make voting a lot easier, especially with the problems we've had over the last several years."

Judy Chia Hui Hsu: 425-745-7809 or jhsu@seattletimes.com