The Washington State House Republican Organizational Committee has retained a law firm to file a temporary restraining order to top the counting of ballots in Spokane County’s 6th Legislative District race between Rep. John Ahern (R-Spokane) and John Driscoll (D-Spokane), which Driscoll leads by 63 votes.

The restraining order, if successful, will stop vote counting until a judge hears a lawsuit the HROC is also filling to gain access as observers to all 7,000 original ballots in the district that had been made duplicates. The Republicans say that they want to make sure that, in the recount, each voter’s intent was correctly interpreted onto the duplicate ballot, and that the original ballots will be viewed before votes are certified on Nov. 25.

HROC executive director Kevin Carns tells PolitickerWA.com that there were three errors among the 200 ballots that were reviewed this morning per the decision of Monday night’s canvassing board meeting, which split 2-1 along party lines to keep all 7,000 ballots from being tested.

"With 3 errors out of 200, that’s a 1.5 percent error rate," Karns said. "It would take less than that to decide the race."

Officials from the Spokane County elections department, however, said that that number depends on what one’s definition of "error" is.

Elections manager Mike McLaughlin said that two of the errors stemmed from the ballots being transferred on to the incorrect precinct number, and the other included an under vote in an uncontested judicial race. None, he said, presented any changes in the vote intention in a contested race.

Still, the Republicans are pressing on under the banner of access.

"At the end of the day it comes down to open and transparent government.," Carns said. "We’ve got a major, major problem with [the current system] and quite honestly we’ll be looking at some legislative fixes come January."

The HROC will be presenting their case in court later this afternoon.

RELATED: Spokane County canvas board will meet to discuss Driscoll-Ahern recount