In Washington's closest elections, volunteers go door-to-door to 'rehab' faulty ballots

Update: Washington's Secretary of State posted on Tuesday afternoon that the recount's results show Dave Upthegrove 53 votes ahead of Sue Kuehl Pederson. The election will be certified Wednesday; Upthegrove will likely face frontrunner Jaime Herrera Beutler in November.

On a mid-August afternoon in Seattle, Lisa McCrummen walked around Phinney Ridge knocking on doors — but her neighbors were not home.

“‘Your neighbor stopped by to make sure your primary election ballot is being counted,’” McCrummen wrote on a note.

McCrummen left notes like this all afternoon at homes where someone voted, but their vote was rejected. That happens around 25,000 to 35,000 times a year in Washington — about a half a percent of all ballots, according to a recent University of Washington study.

The most common reason for a ballot’s rejection is its signature doesn’t match what’s on file, so usually all a voter has to do is fill out a Signature Resolution Form.

But getting that voter’s attention before the deadline can take effort. Normally, it’s up to a county's elections office to tell a voter to fix their ballot before the deadline to tally all votes arrives, a couple weeks after Election Day.

Volunteers like McCrummen, hoping to fix as many ballot issues as possible on this tight timeline, step in when a race is exceptionally close.

McCrummen is not just hoping for any votes, however. She's a volunteer for Dave Upthegrove, a Democrat teetering between second and third place in the closest primary in Washington state history: Commissioner of Public Lands.

Around a week after her neighborhood excursion, the difference between Upthegrove and his Republican competitor in third place, Sue Kuehl Pederson, came down to just 51 votes. The difference triggered a hand recount. (Another Republican, former Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler, pulled ahead of Pederson, Upthegrove, and four Democrats who split the vote.)

Such a close result also triggers a race between the Democratic and Republican state parties over who can do more “ballot curing,” having volunteers like McCrummen call, text, and even show up at voters’ doors.

This little-known and relatively new practice, also called "ballot rehab," can mean all the difference in a close race. There are more than 300 volunteers working on the Democrat side in the land commissioner race, according to Upthegrove’s campaign.

“It's a very labor intensive aspect of a campaign, if it comes down to that,” said Todd Donovan, a professor of political science at Western Washington University. He’s also a Whatcom County Councilmember who’s served on county election canvassing boards in the past, certifying cured ballots.

Upthegrove's campaign reached out to almost 13,000 voters and less than a fifth of them cured their ballots before the deadline.

What's more, volunteers like McCrummen can’t be sure if the voters they’re contacting actually voted for their candidate or one of the other four Democrats, and they’re not supposed to ask.

“We don't have people's registration by party here, but the campaigns do have some sense of which door you're knocking on might be somebody sympathetic to the side that you're trying to find ballots for,” Donovan said. They can cross-reference donation data, info from door-knockers, demographics — to triangulate the houses they visit.

In King County, where McCrummen was knocking doors, there are likely more Upthegrove voters. At the same time, down in Pierce County, GOP volunteers were trying to find votes for Sue Kuehl Pederson, the Republican right behind Upthegrove.

Reaching voters so their votes count

Dave McMullan, chair of the Pierce County GOP, is a ballot-curing veteran. He first did it in 2010, just five years after Washington’s vote-by-mail option became law, in a Puyallup-area state legislative race that came down to 47 votes’ difference between the Republican and Democrat.

“We spent like four days every night after work,” McMullan said. “We drove all over the place."

McMullan and a partner rehabbed 200 ballots all by themselves, and their candidate beat the Democratic incumbent.

Ballot curing is not a practice most voters are familiar with, and they can be understandably suspicious when a volunteer shows up at their door.

“I've gone up to a door where I was told by my person, 'Yeah, go up there, and the lady of the house — it's her ballot,'” McMullan said. “The husband answers the door, and he's just like, ‘What the hell is this? … why are you here? And why are you looking for my wife?’”

Getting to voters in apartment buildings can also be hard, as McCrummen found when she tried to reach a voter named David, but was stymied by his callbox — which emitted a loud ringing when she tried to leave him a voicemail.

“Hi, David," she said as the ringing interrupted her for the third time. “Okay, that's not gonna work at all.”

She didn’t leave a note at his building door, figuring he would never see it.

Other houses, like one down the street from the apartment complex, looked like their residents voted and then went on vacation.

“Shoot,” McCrummen said, ringing the doorbell. “Will they get back in time?”

Hopes hanging on Commissioner of Public Lands

McCrummen is not just doing this out of love for democracy: She wants Upthegrove to win this race to become manager of the state’s public lands because she hopes Upthegrove’s plans to cut down fewer trees will protect Washington’s mature forests.

“I've got a son, and he loves the outdoors,” McCrummen said. “And I want to make sure that he gets to keep playing there, and that the special places that we have remain, and that we have smart, confident people who think holistically.”

Republicans are working hard because if they can get Upthegrove into third place, two Republicans will advance to November — one of the few ways they can guarantee a win in a blue state where they’ve lost every statewide seat since 2020.

But they also worry Upthegrove — who, if he can make it to second place, would be favored to win in November — and his plans could upset rural economies.

“This is a critical position for rural people,” said Rep. J.T. Wilcox, a Republican from Yelm and fifth-generation farmer whose family owns Wilcox Family Farms.

“The Department of Natural Resources [the lands commissioner runs] has a big impact, whether you are a logger or a farmer or a forest landowner," he added. "There's something called the Forest Practices Board that sets the rules. And I really care who gets elected to that position, and I think that either Jamie Herrera Butler or Sue Kuehl Pederson would do a really good job.”

In all, last month, Republicans said they quote “probably” rehabbed about 800 ballots; Democrats, over 2,400.

Efforts like McCrummen’s, though she isn’t sure how many of them were successful, may make all the difference in the race for lands commissioner.

The results of the recount in that very close race will be announced this week.