Tuesday was ballot certification day for Washington's 39 counties, the beginning of a constitutionally mandated process that will conclude Dec. 7 when the governor and the secretary of state bless the state's 2006 general election returns.

Across the state, county canvassing boards examined hard-to-decipher ballots individually and decided which would count. By late afternoon, Clark County's canvassing board was still working its way through about 100 problematic ballots, racing a 5 p.m. deadline, according to state elections director Nick Handy. Statewide, 331 ballots remained to be accounted for with an hour to go. Clark County made its deadline.

On Dec. 7, Secretary of State Sam Reed will certify the returns from judicial, legislative and federal races, and Gov. Chris Gregoire will certify the statewide ballot measure results.

"It's largely a ceremonial event," Handy said.

Once the returns are certified, automatic recounts will begin in two elections.

The state's squeaker is a contest between Blair Brady and Mark Linquist for Wahkiakum County commissioner. Linquist drew 890 votes, Brady 889.

In Spokane's Legislative District 6, the requirement for a recount hung by a single vote. Democrat Don Barlow led Republican John Serben by 260 votes in final unofficial results "If the difference had been 261 votes, there would be no recount," Handy said.

Vote-by-mail can now be judged "an excellent success in this state," Handy said. "The voters like it, and more voters turn out." Statewide turnout this year was 64.5 percent, significantly higher than the average turnout of 60 percent for a nonpresidential even-year election.

Statewide, about 55 percent of ballots that were received on Election Day were counted on Election Day, Handy said.

In Clark County, the Nov. 7 election represented "the first time we've used the new voting system with optical scan ballots to elect individuals to office," said county Auditor Greg Kimsey.

Unfortunately, he said, an envelope designed to satisfy new state election rules ran into problems with the U.S. Postal Service in Portland, which processes mail from Clark County. The state now requires that ballot envelopes include a removable flap covering the voter's signature. But the Portland post office would not accept the envelopes the county produced, Kimsey said, so new ones had to be designed.

"The envelope that we had developed to comply with the new state law didn't work very well," he said. "Many voters did not follow instructions on how to use the envelopes, and on some envelopes the glue strips didn't work very well. You needed to fold them twice and glue them in two places."

As a result, election workers had to use razor blades, tape and lots of manual labor to open some envelopes, which in turn slowed the process of counting the ballots, Kimsey said.

Clark County's closest race, in which state Rep. Jim Dunn, a Republican, was trailing on election night but caught up in late returns to defeat Democrat Pat Campbell, might have been part of a statewide pattern, Handy said.

"We've been doing some research," he said. "There was a trend in which the ballots counted after Election Day did tend to favor Republicans by a small percentage." In 22 legislative races Handy studied, Republicans led Democrats in those late counts by 2 to 3 percent.

"There might have been a very strong Republican turn-out-the-vote effort, or a late-breaking public event could have caused changes in people's thinking," he said.

The late Republican surge in the 6th Legislative District brought that race into recount range, Hardy said. And U.S. Rep. Dave Reichert, a Republican, was ahead by just 2,000 votes on election night but went on to defeat Democrat Darcy Burner by 7,340 votes.