February 01, 2009
There were also funny numbers in the 2007 recount

Sherril Huff's record in recounts is 0 for 2: 2 recounts, and in both recounts the numbers didn't add up. I've mentioned the September 2006 Primary recount: 27 votes separated the winner from the loser, yet 62 ballots vanished in the recount without explanation. That can't happen if ballots are correctly accounted for.

It happened again in the next recount: November 2007 in the contest for Valley Hospital District Commissioner between Andrew Hemstad and Carole Anderson. 55,874 ballots were certified the first time. But only 55,860 ballots were counted in the recount. 14 ballots disappeared without explanation. That can't happen if ballots are correctly accounted for.

The other funny thing that happened that election was that a net 266 votes were "reinterpreted" in the recount from a non-vote to a vote for one of the candidates. That's a suspiciously high 2% of undervotes, or 0.5% of the total votes in that race that changed -- 5 times the variation rate of the 2004 recount. If the votes were correctly interpreted in the recount but were missed in the first count, then It suggests that the tabulation equipment was malfunctioning.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at February 01, 2009 11:55 AM | Email This
Comments
1. Stefan: looking closer at the Hospital District race, each candidate gained 133 votes, while "undervotes" went down by 275 (plus a handful more of overvotes and write ins). Obviously, most of those undervotes were counted toward candidates. But either some of those undervotes just disappeared, or votes for candidates disappeared. It is odd.

I wonder if maybe there's another column left out of the recount report. Can't imagine what it could be ... but there's no total provided, you have to add them up. So I just wonder if something other than ballots could be missing.

Posted by: pudge on February 1, 2009 12:05 PM
2. Pudge -- the number of ballots represents that number of actual physical ballots, pieces of paper. If the number of pieces of paper that they claim to be counting goes down from the first count to the recount, then I can think of only 2 possible explanations:

(1) the number from the first count is correct. In the second count ballots must have either been removed from the pile, or overlooked and left uncounted.

(2) the number from the second count is correct and some ballots were counted more than once (run through the tabulator multiple times) in the first count.

Or it could be a combination of the two that netted out to a decrease of 14.

The fact that this happened proves that ballots were not correctly accounted for in either the first count or the recount, or both.

Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on February 1, 2009 01:31 PM
3. What I am saying is that the recount page does not give a total number of ballots. It just gives some columns that we can add up ourselves.

Posted by: pudge on February 1, 2009 08:45 PM
4. I was the winning candidate in that recount. We had observers at the recount and were surprised at how many additional votes were counted - but as it didn't actually impact the result or even the winning margin we didn't press the issue at the time.

Great that Stefan continues to highlight these interesting cases.

Posted by: Anthony Hemstad on February 1, 2009 10:22 PM
5. Anthony,

I see Maple Valley gave in to the Yarrow Bay/ Ron Sims cabal after you left. Any comments now that you are not involved?

Posted by: Smokie on February 2, 2009 06:53 AM
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