SEATTLE - King County election officials are trying to decide whether or not to count between 10,000 and 20,000 ballots from the November 7th election.

They are absentee ballots and provisional ballots placed in a special compartment in voting machine at polling places.

The rules call for these ballots to be collected at the end of the voting period, placed inside official blue envelope, which are then sealed. The seal number is supposed to match an official report number and that report must be signed by two election officials at the polling place. All this is done to insure proper security of the ballot.

There were approximately 515 polling places that sent the bags to election headquarters after the polls closed. But 116 of them did not follow procedure. Some had mismatched seal numbers, some had excess ballots that wouldn't fit in the official bags and were shipped in plastic containers. Some blue bags were so full that they couldn't be closed and sealed, so poll workers wrapped them in strapping tape or gaffer tape.

The canvass board says it will attempt to count as many of the ballots as possible, but some, particularly those wrapped in plastic with no official signatures, may be difficult to process.

"When 116 out of 515 bags have some sort of a problem, it indicates to me there are some changes that need to be made in our process," Councilmember Julia Patterson said. The elections office says they will upgrade training and take other steps to ensure that the problem will be corrected.

Blogger Stefan Sharkansky, who has been following the elections process closely since the Gregoire-Rossi nail-biter election of 2004 commented: "I'm glad there weren't any close margins as there were in previous years. But this is the sort of thing that leads people to question the integrity of the system."

The ballots are from around the country and are not concentrated enough to make any difference in any of the races. The 8th District Congressional race is all but officially over. Incumbent Dave Reichert has a lead of about 5,000 votes over his Democratic challenger Darcy Burner.

Tuesday, Burner thanked her supporters and noted that Reichert was aided by $6 million in contributions and a litany of big Republican names who visited the area: "The President, the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, the first lady, Newt Gingrich, Carl Rove… and with that they barely kept it."

Burner says she enjoyed the campaign and is not ruling out another run. But she said right now she's just planning a promised trip to Disneyland with her family.