PORT LUDLOW — Election watchdog Ellen Theisen hopes the margin in the Washington governor’s race — already razor thin — grows thinner, thinner and thinner.
It’s not that she’s cheering for Republican Dino Rossi or Democrat Christine Gregoire. She’s rooting for an automatic recount.
If the margin between them is fewer than 2,000 votes — Rossi was leading this morning with 1,920 — there will be the mandatory recount.
And that, Theisen suspects, will expose the shortcomings of electronic voting, which she strongly opposes.
Theisen, a Port Ludlow resident, in April co-founded VotersUnite!, a national organization that collects and spreads information about computer voting foul-ups.
Her group hand-delivered “Myth Breakers for Election Officials” to voting authorities in 22 states on April 20.
Subtitled “A Collection of Information Essential to Those Entrusted with Making Decisions about Election Systems in the United States,” the 63-page book catalogs what the group calls weaknesses of electronic voting.
Snafus and miscounts on Nov. 2 were legion, she says — 88 across the nation — “and these are just the news reports that I’ve been able to collect. People keep reporting them to me.”
Such woes include:
* A North Carolina county where computers “completely lost” 4,500 votes that must be recast before two state races can be decided.
* Electronic election machines in Florida where, when they reached 32,000 votes, reversed themselves and began counting backward.
* Election machines in Austin, Texas, that made the Bush-Cheney ticket the default choice for people trying to vote a straight Democratic ticket. The same machines failed to count 6,900 presidential ballots.
Theisen is quick to add that she’s heard no complaints about Clallam County, which uses punch-card ballots, or about Jefferson County, where ballots are optically scanned.
“Clallam has not come up,” she says. “It sounds like they are doing a really good job up there.
“Jefferson County is going a good job, too.”
