Giving new meaning to 'every vote counts'

Cecily Kaplan is a mother of two, a program manager at a local synagogue, and what they call a perfect voter. She is proud of casting ballots in every election since 1976 because she adores this thing called democracy. But now she is angry.

Ms. Kaplan learned last week that she is one of 723 King County voters who cast valid ballots in the Nov. 2 election but whose vote has not yet been counted - and may never be. With Dino Rossi (R) leading Christine Gregoire (D) by just a handful of votes in the hand recount for the governorship, these absentee ballots have become 24-carat jewels coveted by both Democrats and Republicans.

"I spent a week with my ballot and my voter's guide, studying the issues," says Kaplan. "It's not an issue of who wins but if my vote counts."

Kaplan's pique is a reminder that more is at stake in one of the longest and closest gubernatorial elections in modern US history than just who will run the state next. It's also providing a visible and emotional test of the integrity of the voting system - and people's faith in it.

In virtually every election, of course, there are some lost or disputed ballots. A congressional study after the 2000 presidential election found that, in each of the 20 states it looked at, an average of 2.2 percent of ballots went uncounted.

But when the gap in the vote count is as filament-thin as it is here, such margins of error can make the difference between who sits in the governor's chair and who sits in the recliner at home.

For now, the governor's race remains almost incomprehensibly close. Out of 2.9 million votes cast overall, Mr. Rossi, a former state senator, won the first tally by 261 votes. It was close enough to trigger an automatic machine recount, after which the Bellevue realtor's lead slipped to just 42 votes. Now, with 38 of the state's 39 counties reporting their hand recounts, his lead stands at 49, the tightest governor's race in state history.

Yet with some 900,000 votes still being counted in King County, which surrounds Seattle, Rossi's lead could easily evaporate. So the last thing the Republicans want is another 723 votes from one of the most liberal bastions in America.

"A recount is not a new election," says Chris Vance, chairman of the Washington State Republican Party. "It's not a chance to count ballots that were rejected in an earlier count. Yet that's what the Democrats are trying to do."

Indeed, the votes of Kaplan and her 722 so-far-disenfranchised fellow citizens were not among the ballots originally counted. They were set aside because election workers could not match the signatures on the ballots with voters' signatures on file. These probably would have remained invalid had not one of the ballots belonged to Larry Phillips, an elected Democrat on the King County Council. When he serendipitously learned his name was among the disqualified, he was aghast - and began making phone calls.

An elections supervisor told him the county had been scanning voters' signatures from cards to computers, and some of the signatures did not scan properly into the digital archives used to corroborate absentee ballots. When the county decided the problem was its mistake - not the voters' - and announced it would thus count these votes, the Republicans went to court. Last week, a judge in neighboring Pierce County granted a temporary restraining order preventing King County from counting these ballots. Wednesday at 9:30 a.m. the Washington State Supreme Court will hear the appeal. No one knows when that court will announce its decision.

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