On Tuesday, executive director of the Oregon Republican Party Brandon Danz filed for a partial gubernatorial recount of Multnomah County ballots. The precincts in question are 1017 (NW 23rd), 3253 (Broadway/Rose Quarter) and 3290 (Laurelhurst).
Official elections results from the Oregon Secretary of State give Kitzhaber a win by 22,238 votes, and more recently updated elections results from the Oregonian put the figure at 22,735. In either case, the combined 8,094 votes of the re-count precincts (2,070 ballots cast in precinct 1017, 3,147 ballots cast in precinct 3253 and 2,877 ballots cast in precinct 3290) fall far short of election-altering possibility.
The Oregon GOP is paying for the hand recount, which the county is scheduled to begin at 8:30 am on Monday, Dec. 13, so maybe the Republican Party has something interesting up its sleeve. But… probably not.
@Andrea: Can you get a comment from Danz on the motivation for this partial recount in Democratic strongholds?
Pitiful and hilarious.
What’s funny is Yao Ming is blurry in this photo. I wonder if Yao would have chucked a basketball at Chris Dudley as hard as Shaq did.
@Graham: Danz forwarded me to OR GOP chairman Bob Tiernan, who said that the recount request is intended simply to double-check a hand-counted vote tally against the computer-tallied numbers. He said that he chose Mult. Co. because it’s Oregon’s largest county, and because if any county were vulnerable to attack it’d be this one, and that he chose the three precincts at random. I asked if this is standard, post-election procedure, and Tiernan said that it hasn’t been but he’s going to make it so, as it “keeps everybody honest”.