From today’s Seattle P-I:
A recount in the King County sheriff’s primary race revealed 18 ballots that weren’t counted in the initial tally — an embarrassing misstep for an elections department trying to repair its image after a troubled 2004 election.
And embarrassing misstep. Hmm. But is it?
A new state law passed since last fall allows elections officials to include ballots discovered in the count, Bascom said.
“There’s no question that the errors are unfortunate. They’re the kind of thing we don’t like to see.
“But there have been a lot of improvements since the last election,” Bascom said. She added that election workers discovered the ballots during the county’s reconciliation process and counted them.
So actually, the ballots were counted after all. The reconciliation process worked. That’s a good thing, right?
I dunno… just doesn’t seem all that embarrassing to me.
UPDATE:
One clarification… the ballots were found during the recount, not because of it. These ballots were discovered during the reconciliation process, due to new, stricter controls. Thus, these ballots represent no error rate at all, as they were counted during the normal procedures that are now in place.