SEATTLE - With Washington state in the middle of a recount of its amazingly close governor's race, election officials in Seattle's King County entered a warehouse Friday and found a plastic tray containing 150 misplaced ballots.
The discovery brings the number of belatedly discovered ballots to 723 in the heavily Democratic county — potentially enough to swing the election to Democrat Christine Gregoire.
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The Republican Party went to court Friday to try to block, for the time being, the opening of those ballots. A judge set an afternoon hearing.
King County Elections Director Dean Logan told The Seattle Times that the ballots in the tray, like the 573 other ballots found earlier this week, were mistakenly rejected because there was a problem with how the voters' signatures had been scanned into the county's computer system. The tray apparently was left behind and forgotten in the warehouse, Logan said.
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