SPOKANE COUNTY, Wash. — Thursday morning Washington's Secretary of State Steve Hobbs certified the state's election and put the state's 39 counties on notice.
Now nearly two million ballots will have to be recounted by hand in the tight race for Washington's public lands commissioner.
Spokane County just finished counting and certified its election on Tuesday, but Monday morning a handful of employees will come back in and manually count thousands of ballot.
Days after its primary election was certified, Spokane County's counting room is quiet and empty, but that won't be for long.
“So we’ll end up recounting just under 145,000 ballots, which is a lot of ballots,” Vicky Dalton, Spokane County auditor, said.
Dalton said as they finished the tallies this week, employees were anticipating it wasn't a wrap on the primary.
“Yeah, they were already aware they’d be coming back, in all likelihood, to perform a manual recount,” Dalton said.
According to the Secretary of State, a mandatory manual recount is triggered when candidates are separated by less than 1,000 votes and less than a quarter of a percent of the total votes cast.
It's been 20 years since that happened in a statewide election when there were two recounts and a lawsuit before Christine Gregoire was declared governor.
It's been 60 years since a statewide recount in a primary election. However, recounts are less unusual for Dalton's crew.
“Since 2001, Spokane County has done 29 recounts, most of them have been hand, manual recounts," Dalton said. "So we are very skilled at this, we are very accustomed to it.”
Twelve teams of two will fill seats next week to count votes, with observers from the campaigns or political parties also standing tableside as the count happens.
“I know it sounds easy to count, you just take a piece of paper and 1, 2, 3, 4," Dalton said. "That’s not how it works. Counting, especially this tedious work that's going to go on for hours and days, is very difficult."
It's a painstaking task that will likely take four days. Dalton said very few recounts result in changes in the numbers.
