John Ahern

The recount in the 44th Legislative District race between Mike Hope (R-Lake Stevens) and Rep. Liz Loomis (D-Snohomish) will begin tomorrow in Snohomish County.

Hope won the first count by 118 votes out of more than 68,000 votes cast over Loomis, who was appointed to the seat midway through the term when John Lovick stepped down upon being elected Snohomish County sheriff.

Elections officials estimate that the count will take two days to complete, and will be done by ten counting boards working in teams of two and each candidate will have representatives observing the process.

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Representative-elect John Driscoll (D-Spokane) has finally won the race for the 6th Legislative District, position 2, exactly one month after election day.

Spokane County elections officials have announced that, after a mandatory hand recount required from an initial margin of victory of less than 0.25 percent, Driscoll remains ahead of Rep. John Ahern (R-Spokane), though the vote counted changed slightly from the original tally.

When election results were certified in late November, Driscoll led Ahern by 74 votes, and after the recount the official margin dropped slightly to 72, with Driscoll totaling 35,106 votes to Ahern's 35,034.

The recount taking place in the 6th Legislative District race won by Democratic challenger John Driscoll (D-Spokane) is going smoothly according to Spokane County Republican Party Chair Curt Fackler, who is among those observing the effort on behalf of Driscoll's opponent, Rep. John Ahern.

The main issue going into the recount revolved around the use of the "duplicate ballots" created by elections officials to replace original ballots containing errors and blemishes that kept them from being counted by voting machines. Republicans tried unsuccessfully to have these duplicate ballots reviewed against their originals.

With the recount being done from the neatly marked duplicate ballots, Fackler said he did not expect much of a change from the original results once all the votes are finished being recounted Thursday afternoon.

The automatic recount process will begin today in the first of two state legislative district races whose election results were close enough, within 150 votes and less than 0.25 percent, to require a state mandated recount.

The 6th LD race between John Driscoll (D-Spokane) and Rep. John Ahern (R-Spokane) will see its votes retabulated this afternoon and again Wednesday and Thursday by election officials with observers from both parties on hand. Results will be certified at a Spokane County canvassing board meeting Friday morning. Driscoll currently leads Ahern by 74 votes out of 70,140 cast. The same district also saw challenger Kevin Parker (R-Spokane) unseat Rep. Don Barlow (D-Spokane) in the election for the district's other state House seat this November.

The state's other recount will take place beginning Tuesday, December 9 in the 44th LD. There challenger Mike Hope (R-Everett) has a 118 vote lead over Rep. Liz Loomis (D-Snohomish), who was appointed midway through the last session. Those results will be certified on Friday, Devember 12.

A judge turned down the House Republican Organizational Committee’s lawsuit yesterday seeking a restraining order on the counting of ballots in the 6th Legislative District race, but that will not deter them from going forward with their lawsuit to revisit the original ballots that were made into duplicates.

House Minority Leader Richard DeBolt (R-Chehalis) said that, because less than one percent of the more than 7,000 duplicate ballots would need to be incorrect in order to overturn John Driscoll’s 63 vote lead over Rep. John Ahern, the possible discrepancies need to be explored.

"I've always been an advocate of open government," DeBolt told PolitickerWA.com. "The last thing we need to do is have people not trust our election system."

State Rep. John Ahern

The Washington State House Republican Organizational Committee has retained a law firm to file a temporary restraining order to top the counting of ballots in Spokane County’s 6th Legislative District race between Rep. John Ahern (R-Spokane) and John Driscoll (D-Spokane), which Driscoll leads by 63 votes.

The restraining order, if successful, will stop vote counting until a judge hears a lawsuit the HROC is also filling to gain access as observers to all 7,000 original ballots in the district that had been made duplicates. The Republicans say that they want to make sure that, in the recount, each voter’s intent was correctly interpreted onto the duplicate ballot, and that the original ballots will be viewed before votes are certified on Nov. 25.

HROC executive director Kevin Carns tells PolitickerWA.com that there were three errors among the 200 ballots that were reviewed this morning per the decision of Monday night’s canvassing board meeting, which split 2-1 along party lines to keep all 7,000 ballots from being tested.

More than a week after last Tuesday’s election, with nearly every ballot tallied and reported, three state legislative races are on the cusp of requiring a mandatory recount, which would come about in a race decided by a margin of less than one half of one percent.

Two of those elections, the 6th Legislative District matchup of Rep. John Ahern (R-Spokane) and John Driscoll (D-Spokane) and the 44th LD race with Rep. Liz Loomis (D-Snohomish) and Mike Hope (R-Everett), are almost certain to require another round, and may even call for a manual recount.

As of Tuesday night, the challengers held narrow leads in each district, and county elections officials predict that fewer than one thousand ballots remain.

Spokane's 6th Legislative District has proven to be the state's most evenly divided swing district in 2008. In addition to both the the district's races finishing with margins of just a few percentage points, there is a good chance that both incumbents will be unseated. The catch is, the 6th has a split delegation.

Republican Challenger Kevin Parker (R-Spokane) has narrowly defeated outgoing Rep. Don Barlow (D-Spokane) in position 1, and in the 2nd seat race Democrat John Driscoll leads Rep. John Ahern (R-Spokane) by fewer than 100 votes as of today, with a mandatory recount on the way after all of the votes are counted.

LD 6 is shaped like a crescent, and skirts around the Western edge of Spokane.

Check out this map chart of vote distribution in the Driscoll-Ahern race that Jim Camden at the Spokesman-Review created to see where that split is forming. An interesting pattern emerges.