Bellevue council race triggers recount | UPDATE

Bellevue residents have waited more than three weeks to find out who will be their seventh, and final, City Council member.

And the wait continues.

The race between Parks and Community Services Board Member and retired attorney John Stokes, and land-use attorney Aaron Laing will be subject to a recount by hand of the nearly 35,000 ballots received from Bellevue. The candidates are vying for the seat formerly held by Grant Degginger, who decided not to run for reelection.

Kim Van Ekstrom, spokeswoman for King County Elections, said the recount will begin Dec. 8 at 9 a.m. with a likely conclusion on Dec. 11 or 12.

Laing has been extremely close behind throughout the race, but has never been able to grab the lead. He said he was proud of the campaign he ran, and he showed optimism that the recount could swing the race his way.

“I think the fact that it is a mandatory hand recount, they wouldn’t require it if there wasn’t some chance that it would turn around,” he said.

Stokes, who has led the race wire to wire, said he expected a recount. He feels good about the job King County Elections has done in counting the votes and doesn’t expect much to change.

“I’m confident in the end, we’ll still be ahead, so we’re just going through with the process,” he said.

State law stipulates that the margin between the two candidates to necessitate a hand recount is less than 150 votes, and .25 percent of the vote. A machine recount happens with a margin less than 2,000 votes and .5 percent. With the final tally in Monday night, Stokes led the race by a count of 15,239 votes (49.93 percent) to 15,188 votes (49.76 percent) for Laing. Laing closed the gap quickly on the final day. Results released Monday evening showed Stokes with a 110-vote lead, but in the final count, Laing received 100 votes to Stokes’ 41 to cut the margin.

County staff will work through three other recounts from this election season. A council race in Des Moines was close enough to trigger a machine recount, while races for the Enumclaw School District and the Public Hospital District will be recounted by hand

This recount represents an outlier in the county, where many by-hand counts have come in smaller areas with only a couple hundred voters. In the 2011 election, Bellevue voters returned 35,865 ballots, or nearly 54 percent. This turnout represented the highest of the major cities in the county, showing the importance of this election to the city of Bellevue. Among the recounts, the next highest was the Enumclaw schools race, with more than 8,200 votes to be counted and a 53 percent turnout.

Political groups, and many voters, made Bellevue’s election a partial referendum on the East Link light-rail project, which has been a dividing point on the council. Much of the political bargaining on the project has been completed, and the public showed their support for incumbents in favor of Sound Transit’s preferred route. Both John Chelminiak and Claudia Balducci garnered nearly two-thirds of the vote.

Bellevue is used to more lop-sided election results, according to county records. Since 1999, the closest race in Bellevue came in 2009 when Kevin Wallace defeated Patsi Bonincontri by nearly 1,100 votes, and a 3 percent margin.

Many observers predicted a close race between Balducci and challenger Patti Mann, and an even tighter contest between Stokes and Laing. On election night, Nov. 8, Stokes opened the evening with a 127-vote lead that fluctuated from a high close to 200 votes, all the way down to the final margin of 51 when the election was certified Tuesday. The margin ended up being less than the number of write-in ballots submitted in the race, 95.

Van Ekstrom could not say whether a hand recount in King County has swung an election recently. Along with the larger population in this recount, King County has dealt with few hand recounts since the vote-by-mail system came into play in 2009. Van Ekstrom said the mail system is more reliable than voting booths, so the recount will serve to look for a significant mistake in the counting process.

“Since we have been administering within this environment there’s not been a long track record,” she said. “In a vote-by-mail environment, there’s less of an opportunity for human error to occur, but it could of course.”

COUNCIL ELECTION RESULTS

POSITION 1

Aaron Laing – 15,188 votes, 49.76 percent

John Stokes – 15,239 votes, 49.93 percent

Write-in – 95 votes, .31 percent

POSITION 3

John Chelminiak – 20,756 votes, 67.97 percent

Michelle Hilhorst – 9,701 votes, 31.77 percent

POSITION 5

Claudia Balducci – 20,189 votes, 65.46 percent

Patti Mann – 10,573 votes, 34.28 percent

POSITION 7