Update: Kitsap County voters picked Dori over Mike Pence for president
Nov 29, 2016, 4:51 PM | Updated: Dec 6, 2016, 2:40 pm
Update: A tweet from the Kitsap Auditor shows that KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson was the fifth-highest vote getting write-in pick in the county for president of the United States.
Kitsap County voters selected write-ins for President 4,453 times. Here are the top six. pic.twitter.com/oGPRCKA2MU
— Kitsap Auditor (@KitsapAuditor) December 6, 2016
“Those are my people over there,” Dori said after hearing the news. “Paulsbo, Scandihoovians, you’d better believe it. … I was the only non-politician on the list.”
Still no telling exactly where Dori finished in the entire state.
Original story: A recount will be taking place in Wisconsin — and likely Michigan and Pennsylvania — to check the validity of votes in the 2016 election. But that won’t be happening with Washington voters — no matter how much KIRO Radio’s Dori Monson wants to know the results of his grassroots campaign.
“I am challenging the results of the election because I still haven’t found out how many votes I got and I can’t figure out why I’ve not been able to obtain this information,” Dori told Washington Secretary of State Kim Wyman on Tuesday.
Is the election recount all about closure for Democrats?
Wyman speculated that Dori likely finished as the fifth-highest vote-getter in the state: behind Democrat Hillary Clinton (1,742,239 votes), Republican Donald Trump (1,221,245), Libertarian Gary Johnson (160,812) and Green Party candidate Jill Stein (58,389). Wyman guessed that Dori was the leading write-in candidate, which could put him ahead of the lesser-known party nominees — Darrell L. Castle, Constitution Party (17,689); Alyson Kennedy, Socialist Workers Party (4,305); and Gloria Estela La Riva, Socialism & Liberation Party (3,518).
“You might have been fifth,” Wyman said.
How a Washington recount would work
Disenchanted with the possibilities of Trump and Clinton, Dori embarked on his own journey to the White House by filling out forms to be an official write-in candidate, with the slogan “I’ll leave you alone.” His stated goal was to finish above Stein, who is the instigator of the national recount, raising millions of dollars to start that process.
Though about a dozen listeners sent in photos of their ballots with Dori written in for president, the exact number that were cast would need to be hand counted, Wyman said.
Wyman explained that the recount laws in Washington state were changed a few years ago, mainly to get results out faster to the media and public. In the 2016 race, 78,000 Washington residents wrote in a candidate for president, out of more than 3.2 million ballots cast.
Wyman said the first thing election officials look at is if the number of write-in votes could change the outcome of the election. In this election, the 78,000 votes would not put Trump over Clinton’s total.
“The number of write-ins total will not change the outcome of the race, so we report those as a solid number,” Wyman said. “I can tell you, though, that 40,000 votes were cast as write-ins in Snohomish, King and Pierce Counties. And, I think, more than likely, the vast majority of those probably went to you.”
Wait. Is she being serious?
“No,” she said, laughing. “I’m just trying to make you feel good because the election officials aren’t going to actually spend the time hand-telling those 78,000 votes.”
So Dori will never know how many votes he received?
“Not individual write-in votes cast because, remember, that’s just 78,000 for president,” Wyman answered. “You had other races all across the ballot and it’s a function of time. The county auditors could do that. The legislature decided that it wasn’t necessarily the best use of their time to tally up write-in votes.”
Can Dori proclaim with some level of truthfulness that he was fifth-leading vote-getter in the state?
“I think you can, yes,” she said. “… Well, that’s assuming you were No. 1 in the write-ins. … I think, actually, in some fronts, it is a fair assumption if you think of the number of listeners that you have and the reach that you have.”
And if Dori were to challenge the state election, ala Stein?
“Well, at this point, you’d have to pay for the recount and you’d have to put a deposit, a percentage of the total cost of the recount,” Wyman said. “It would depend on if you want a hand count or a machine count. Machine count is less expensive.”
How much does a hand count cost?
“We’re gonna need a lot of money,” she said. “It’s by the number of votes you want counted and I think the deposit is 10 cents a vote, and then you are on the hook for whatever the actual recount costs.”
