Bellevue Council Manual Recount Expected to Finish Today

Observers and poll workers gathered at the King County Elections office in Renton to count by hand each Bellevue ballot to determine who will have Position 1 on the city council.

The closely contested race is between John Stokes and Aaron Laing for the open seat to be vacated by Councilman Grant Degginger. After the tabulation of the general election, which borught in 35,865 votes from Bellevue, Stokes was ahead by 51 votes, and .17 percent, which qualified the race for an automatic manual recount. The next official count will be released after the manual recount is over and certification will be Dec. 16.

While the race was close, Sherril Huff, the county director of elections, said it was statistically unlikely that Stokes would lose his lead. Turnovers are unlikely in recounts, especially in the era of vote-by-mail, she said.

"It's very very rare. In a really, really close race, that's a possibility," she said, saying it's more likely in a race with single digits.

Huff said that vote by mail has been a more accountable system than the polling booth system that the county used to use.

She said that it's not unusual to see close races in "off-year" elections -- general elections without the presidential and gubernatorial races on the ballot -- when there are fewer voters. This year, there are three manual recounts in King County. The two others are Enumclaw School District Position 4 and a race in Public Hospital District 4 (Snoqualmie Valley Hospital District).

However, this year, the turnout has been better than past off-years, Huff said.

"I think what we see going on in our communities and the country as a whole is that people see the importance of weighing in on the issues. I hope they are," she said.

A mandatory hand recount is triggered when the difference between the two candidates is fewer than 150 votes and when the difference between them is less than a quarter of a percent, according to elections officials.

The manual recount is done by two counters employed by the county, observed by two observers, one chosen by the campaigns of Stokes and Laing each.

Thursday, the groups sat at the 14 tables to investigate the ballots, in an efficient system that could see the recount finish by early Friday afternoon. Laing also was one of the observers.

"I couldn't ask someone to come down here and spend their day to do this and not do this myself," he said.

Laing said that he was not surpried by the closeness of the race and said that the race was within the range of what he expected the outcome to be, based on his doorbelling throughout the community.

Stokes also said he wasn't surprised to see how close the race was, given that there was an open seat.

In the other contested races, incumbent city council members Claudia Balducci and John Chelminiak easily won over their challengers, Patti Mann and Michelle Hilhorst. Councilwoman Jennifer Robertson was not challenged for her seat.

Election night saw the. However, the campaign for the seat being vacated by Degginger grew heated, as .

The mailers were not sent by Laing, who ran a positive campaign, but by a group backed by Eastside developers, including Bellevue Square developer Kemper Freeman.

While one of the key issues in the race was transportation and development, the city of Bellevue has already reached an agreement with Sound Transit on the development of the East Link light rail line. That meant that any new council member would not have to make that decision, but any council member would have to deal with the implementation of the agreement and the lessening of the impact to the neighborhoods along the line.

Laing said he did not think that the closeness of the race was a signal of a split in the city.

"I don't think the city is as divided as people think they are," he said. "I think there is a lot of misinformation out there," he added, declining to explain.

Stokes said that Bellevue's defeat of Initiative 1125, which could have affected the future of tolling and transportation funding in Washington, was a sign that Bellevue supported the directions that the state and region were going on transportation.

"I don't think Bellevue is is that split on the issues of light rail or the direction that the council is going," Stokes said. "We need to get the council working together... the hard part is the implementation part."