Spokane County canvass board will meet to discuss Ahern-Driscoll recount

The Spokane County canvassing board will meet this afternoon to decide on a key parameter of what will almost certainly be a hand recount in the 6th Legislative District race between state Rep. John Ahern (R-Spokane) and Democrat John Driscoll. Driscoll leads by 63 votes at the moment, out of nearly 70,000 cast.

The board will be addressing whether or not a hand recount in the race, which would take place if the margin of victory was less than 0.25 percent, would include counting duplicate ballots, as has been done in the past, or original ballots that could not be read by the counting machine.

Duplicates are made if an error on the ballot, usually an overvote where an extra pen mark falls next to a candidate or perhaps a coffee stain, keeps the machine from counting the vote. These ballots are then reviewed by a team of two county elections workers who recreate a ballot based on the intent of the voter.

Spokane County Republicans are requesting that the original ballots be used in the hand recount rather than the duplicate ballots to ensure that the voters intent was not misrepresented the first time.

The three-person canvassing board is made up of Spokane County Prosecutor Steve Tucker (R-Spokane), County Councilwoman Bonnie Mager (D-Spokane) and County Auditor Vicky Dalton (D-Spokane). Although in the past they have always counted the duplicate ballots in a hand recount, this would be the first hand recount since the onset of 100 percent mail-in voting, which now takes place in Spokane County. The nature of mail-in voting greatly increases the amount of unreadable ballots and it is estimated that up to 6,000 ballots in the LD 6 race may be duplicates.

Curt Fackler, the chair of the Spokane County Republican Party, says that Republicans will likely take legal action if the board decides not to use the original ballots. He argues that the additional surge of duplicate ballots tied to mail-in voting ought to change the precedent in the name of fairness, adding that the likelihood of error is greater among election workers, especially those dealing with two candidates who share the same first name, than it is within a voting machine.

The outcome of the meeting will be known later today. Check back at PoltickerWA.com for the results.