In our view Nov. 19: Well Done, Voters

n Tuesday afternoon, the Clark County elections office announced 200 more ballots had been counted from the Nov. 4 election. We’ll add to that statistic a couple of compliments, one to local voters for staging the biggest election in Clark County history, and another to the administrators and staff at the elections office for conducting what — so far — appears to be one of the best-run elections ever.

That first compliment is based on the 85.01 percent turnout of registered voters as 184,056 people participated (with an unspecified but small number of ballots still expected to trickle in).

The second compliment is based on the relatively few glitches in the process, despite the record turnout of local voters.

But trumping both compliments is this side note: It ain’t over yet.

County commissioner candidates Tom Mielke and Pam Brokaw are almost certainly headed for an automatic recount. Mielke’s lead grew to 206 votes Tuesday, but that’s only 0.12 percent of the total, far below the threshold of one-fourth of 1 percent that triggers the mandatory recount. The recount won’t be announced until Nov. 25 and is expected to begin Monday, Dec. 1., and should take about a week.

On the other hand (we don’t mean to make you dizzy here), despite that recount, there is this history-based reality: This election almost certainly is over. Since 1981 there have been nine countywide recounts, and not once has the original outcome been reversed. There’s little reason to believe that trend will change, so for supporters of Mielke, the Republican, it’s all over but the shouting.

And those nine recounts have been produced even less change in the vote totals than you might suspect. Never has there been a change of more than 16 votes, and the average change has been less than six votes. The most recent local recount was in 2004, in the gubernatorial race, when Chris Gregoire picked up three votes in Clark County and Dino Rossi picked up seven for a net gain of just four votes for Rossi.

Beyond this year’s Mielke-Brokaw race, though, there were clear winners up and down the ballot. And the same held true nationwide. The cynic would growl that this election appeared smoothly run only because there were no razor-thin national races. That could be, but no one will ever know for sure. What we do know is that, despite dire warnings sounded by both parties across the country, few problems materialized. The Associated Press on election night quoted Doug Chapin, director of electionline.org at the Pew Center on the States: “For those of us who care about the American process, this was a good day. It was a massive undertaking with staggering levels of turnout.”

Problems with voting were sporadic and inconsequential, the AP noted, and Chris Riggall of Diebold’s Premier Elections Solutions said, “Given the tsunami of voter participation, which is a wonderful thing that we’ve experienced (on Nov. 4) and in those advanced early voting states, it was a remarkably quiet day overall.”

You’ll pardon Clark County Auditor Greg Kimsey, however, if he refrains from any confetti-tossing or high-five-exchanging. “No election is perfect,” he said Tuesday. “This year we spelled Ralph Nader’s name wrong on the ballot. But the wonderful thing about mail voting is that it allows us to catch problems and notify the public, and if some people don’t receive ballots, we’ve got time to fix that kind of problem.”

Statewide, a record 3 million votes have been counted. The turnout is 82.6 percent. Take a bow, Clark County voters, for outpacing the statewide turnout, and take pride, Clark County elections officials, in a job well done. So far.