Vote is in: Election officials like new King County office

After being headquartered for more than a century in downtown Seattle, King County Elections has gone suburban — and high-tech.

Top managers and most full-time employees have moved from scattered offices in Seattle and Tukwila to a single building off Interstate 405 between Southcenter and downtown Renton. Election-warehouse workers will move soon.

Elections will be managed from one place for the first time in more than 30 years.

Workers still are getting used to the building's high security, which was designed by two consulting firms, one with expertise in election security, the other in casino security.

When employees left a meeting without electronically "badging" out, security officers called to ask what caused the breach of protocol.

Fingerprint readers are used to open the building and enter the "cage" where ballots are stored. Fifty-nine cameras and motion detectors, monitored by security officers in Seattle, watch the building continuously.

"It's a security system to die for, if you're in the elections business," Elections Director Sherril Huff said Tuesday on a tour of the building on Southwest Grady Way.

The two-story, 94,000-square-foot building combines functions previously performed in four locations.

It has enough room on one floor to count a million mail ballots in what is expected to be the largest vote-by-mail election in any jurisdiction in the country next November.

While some workers are getting ready for the Feb. 19 presidential primary, others are preparing for "stress tests" of equipment that will sort and track ballot envelopes in the November election.

Several independent reviews of King County Elections in recent years have recommended consolidating operations under one roof. The Citizens' Elections Oversight Committee, which wrote one of those reviews, visited the building while it was being remodeled.

"We were very impressed," said committee Chairwoman Ellen Hansen.

"It meets all the needs that we saw when we talked about consolidating in one location. It's a very exciting development."

The building will hold 70 to 80 full-time employees and up to 450 workers in the event of a countywide manual recount like the one that followed the close 2004 governor's election.

The move to Renton hasn't been without its difficulties. Eleven employees quit after the move to Renton was announced, most citing the commute.

Renton also wasn't the cheapest site for taxpayers.

County Executive Ron Sims in 2005 secured an option to buy a building on Rainier Avenue South in Seattle for $23 million. But the option lapsed and the move to a consolidated site was delayed while he studied other site alternatives as directed by the Metropolitan King County Council.

The Rainier Avenue building was wired to accommodate a computer data center serving all county departments — something that isn't true of the Renton building.

The County Council is now considering leasing a Tukwila building for the data center.

County facilities managers say the $50 million combined cost of election headquarters and the Tukwila data center is $18.6 million above what it would have cost to enlarge the Rainier Avenue site to accommodate both Elections and the data center.

But elections chief Huff is happy with her new headquarters, which she says was "well worth waiting for."

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com