King County officials defend slow vote counting, stress accuracy

The King County elections division says it prefers to count votes slowly, even if that means posting some of the slowest results in the nation on election night.

By midnight Tuesday, the county had counted only 38.2 percent of all poll-vote results. A few years ago, the count would have been wrapping up by that time.

The county posted results from 96 percent of precincts at about 2 a.m.

Interim elections director Jim Buck said the biggest lesson learned from the contested 2004 gubernatorial election, and the criticism that followed, was that it's more important to count the votes right than to count them fast.

"We certainly don't want to end up in any kind of situation that even mirrors problems in the past," Buck said. "Our aims and goals are to get it right and get it accurate ... [The workers] are not in a rush."

Buck detailed all the steps involved with getting poll results to the elections office: When workers shut down the polls at 8 p.m., they have to follow 13 pages of procedures. Workers from each of the 507 polls then deliver the voting-machine memory cards, ballots and extra supplies to one of 19 depots, which can take 45 minutes of driving in some cases.

The poll materials have to be checked in at the depots, which takes 15 minutes if there's no line. In past years, results from memory cards were then sent from the depots to the King County elections officials by modem. Now, for added security, those memory cards are driven to the King County elections annex at Boeing Field, which requires anywhere from five to 45 minutes.

"That's the generic best-case scenario, then you add weather, darkness — [Tuesday] night, floods — whatever we have, and you get the counts where the majority of the ballots, the memory cards, are [in] at midnight and 1 o'clock," Buck said.

This week's flooding closed several roads, and the detours slowed down the delivery between polls and depots. At three locations in Duvall and Carnation, roads were blocked and police stored the ballots overnight.

Darcy Burner and U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert, whose 8th District Congressional race was very tight, both were satisfied with the time it took to post results, according to their campaigns.

"We had kind of anticipated they would be taking extra care this time around," said Jaime Smith, spokeswoman for Burner's campaign.

Kimberly Cadena, a spokeswoman for the Reichert campaign, said, "Certainly everyone hopes to get information when they expect it, but with this weather it's understandable it would create some logistical problems for them."

Buck said the elections office is investigating a report that someone walked into a Bellevue polling location and inserted several ballots into a ballot box.

Also Tuesday, King County elections counted more than double the number of absentee ballots it counted in the September primary. The county hopes to shut down poll voting in 2008 and conduct all elections by mail. It is currently shopping for higher-speed tabulating machines.

As of Wednesday, the elections office had counted 380,373 out of a projected 600,000 votes.

Sharon Pian Chan: 206-464-2958 or schan@seattletimes.com