The late Tom Crowson has come up short of winning a seat on a local fire district board of commissioners.
The Lewis County Auditor’s Office Elections Department released and certified the results of a hand recount of the race for Lewis County Fire District 5 on Tuesday afternoon.
The count found that there were no errors in the initial ballot count, meaning that the results already released to the public were accurate.
Winning candidate Rick LeBoeuf brought in 845 votes while Tom Crowson received 841.
The difference of just four votes initiated a state-mandated hand recount, which verified the accuracy of the initial count.
That result is now official and certified after being signed and approved by Lewis County Commissioner Lindsey Pollock, Lewis County Auditor Larry Grove and Lewis County Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Scott Gripp.
“We finished our recount of Fire District 5 commissioner seat two and, after hand-counting all of the ballots and doing all of the extra work to make sure that we checked every batch, no numbers changed,” election specialist Heather Sorgen said. “Not one number changed, so we were right on. Excellent."
In Washington state recounts are triggered by small margins of victory. Hand recounts like the one in Lewis County, which began on Monday, Dec. 8, are triggered by the smallest of margins. To be exact, a vote difference equal to or less than a quarter of 1% of ballots cast in an election triggers a hand recount.
According to Lewis County Chief Deputy Auditor Tom Stanton, the recent recount required county staff to count each ballot by hand and count them in the same batches they were received.
Ballots are often received in batches as ballots deposited in ballot boxes are collected. Stanton and Grove added that the last hand recount in the county happened in August 2024 for a race for state public lands commissioner.
During the election for the Fire District 5 commissioner seat, Crowson took the lead to start after preliminary results were released on election day. At the time, he led by 31 votes. But as county staff continued counting later batches of ballots, Crowson’s lead began to shrink until Leboeuf took the narrow lead that brought him victory.
Had Crowson held onto the lead, the position would have remained open due to Crowson's death just before the primary election in August. According to the county auditor's office, that situation would have required the two sitting Lewis County Fire Protection District 5 commissioners to appoint a replacement to serve the term until the seats next election in 2027.
Lewis County Fire District 5 is currently without a fire chief after the commissioners fired Jonathan Beck last October. The district has also fired two other chiefs since 2023.
