PORT ANGELES — The potential gain may be less than they had originally thought, but campaign workers for Edna Petersen, who is 30 votes behind opponent Max Mania for a Port Angeles City Council seat, feel their effort to have every vote counted may make enough difference to at least force a recount.
Campaign workers for Petersen, whose sights are set on Position 2 — are contacting Port Angeles voters who turned in general election ballots with missing or invalid signatures and urging them to fill out the affidavits from the Clallam County Auditor’s Office so their votes can be counted.
On Monday, when the campaign received the list of challenged Port Angeles ballots from the auditor, the number was 31 — 32 counting a woman who died after returning her ballot unsigned.
By Tuesday, that number had fallen to 25, since some of the challenged ballots had been corrected and were included in Tuesday’s fourth tally in the Nov. 3 election.
Although Petersen’s campaign got the information on Monday — when Mania’s lead was 32 votes — it didn’t act on it until after the vote count on Tuesday, when his lead fell to 30 votes.
Petersen and May were unaware that some ballots had been corrected on Tuesday, when campaign workers began making the calls to voters.
Pushing for a recount
The point of the Petersen campaign effort is to push the candidates’ final tally at least to the point that a machine recount would be mandatory.
Mania’s campaign also has begun making phone calls to the same voters to urge them to correct their ballots.
“I’m all for participant democracy,” Mania said earlier this week, “so every vote should be counted.”
As of Tuesday’s count Mania, a 41-year-old grocery clerk and writer who serves on several arts boards, has 2,721 votes, or 50.28 percent, while Petersen, the 69-year-old owner of Necessities &Temptations gift shop — who served on the council as an appointee from 2006 to 2008 — has 2,691 votes, or 49.72 percent.
The difference, as it stands now, is .56 percent.
A race that ends with less than a half of a percentage-point difference between two candidates goes to an automatic machine recount, said David Ammons, spokesman for the Washington Secretary of State.
The certification date, Nov. 24, is when the three-member Clallam County Canvassing Board will schedule any necessary recounts in the general election. A recount is expected in the race between Port of Port Angeles incumbent John Calhoun and Brad Collins.
Petersen’s campaign manager, Andrew May, said a recount also is highly likely in his candidate’s race against Mania.
“The last two counts have trended toward Edna,” May — who also writes a gardening column for the Peninsula Daily News — said Wednesday.
“So I asked Shoona Radon, [elections supervisor], if it was reasonable, with this trend, that this will go to a mandatory recount and she said yes.”
Also, she told him that urging people individually to return affidavits and correct the ballots probably would increase the number that are corrected, he said.
And, May said, all the people he had called by Wednesday morning said that they had not yet returned the affidavit but that, having been reminded, they would do so.
“I would not be doing this if the auditor’s office did not say that it’s probable that this could go into a recount,” May said.
More to come
May — who Petersen calls her “numbers guy” — said he believes the race is undecided. He said that he thinks that it is “reasonable to expect that two to 10 other ballots” are still working their way through the mail system from overseas.
He added that he estimates that Petersen needs only four or five more votes for a machine recount to be required.
“If more ballots come in, those numbers could change,” May added.
Said Petersen: “Nobody can definitely say what ballots are really out, how many there are or where they are or what’s happening . . . So there is no definite count.”
On Wednesday afternoon, May said that 17 voters with invalid ballots had been contacted by him or one of four other Petersen supporters.
Petersen herself made one phone call, but the campaign afterward concluded it would be best if she wasn’t one of the people contacting the voters.
The next count of ballots is scheduled for Tuesday.
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Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or at tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.
Managing Editor/News Leah Leach can be reached at 360-417-3531 or leah.leach@peninsuladailynews.com.
