The Inlander13%
Three candidates hope to make it past the primary in the race for Spokane County auditor 6%
By Colton Rasanen15%
7/15/2026, 7:00:00 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 20 faulty reasoning types, including Anecdotal, False Dilemma, and Ad Hominem, with Appeal to Authority as the most egregious example at 7.9% saturation with 141 hits. Analysis detected 701 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,787 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 21.1% and a BS Rank of 6% (20,747 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 94.80% of the article peer group.
Over the past 28 years — that’s seven four-year terms — Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton says she’s found most people don’t know what someone in her position does.
Part of the reason for that is the fact that a county auditor oversees four different county departments: elections, finances, recording and licensing.
The other part is that it’s an administrative role.
While the public regularly engages with elected officials on city councils, the county commission or even in the state Legislature who get to make changes to laws, a county auditor’s job is to follow the law as it’s currently written.
Despite the public being generally unaware of an auditor’s role, Dalton says the work her office is tasked with touches everyone in Spokane County.
“This office has the public record of your deed for your home, which is probably your most valuable financial asset.
We also have the records for the title of your car, which generally can be most people’s second-most valuable asset, or the first if they don’t own a home,” Dalton explains.
“We record the way money is spent, so that’s your taxpayer dollars … and we do the annual financial statement, where you can actually go and see what was budgeted and how much did they spend.
“Then there’s your ballot, which is your voice in our democracy.
So, we make sure that you can register to vote, that you get your ballot, that we get it back, that we count it, and we count it accurately.
Then finally, and I’m hoping that this is everyone’s most-valuable asset, we issue the marriage licenses,” she continues.
“A lot of the services we provide are not temporary services, we’re going to hold those [documents] forever to the end of our civilization.
I’m not talking 10 years, 20 years, 100 years.
I’m talking centuries.”
For the first time since 1998, Dalton won’t be on the ballot.
At 65 years old, she’s ready to retire so the public can choose another leader for the office.
In the Aug. 4 primary election, voters will choose between Callie Gee, Dale Whitaker and Michael Cathcart to decide which two candidates move forward to the Nov. 3 general election.
CALLIE GEE, 24
A lifelong Spokanite, Callie Gee is the only Democrat vying for the position.
She graduated from Washington State University in 2024 with a bachelor’s degree in accounting and finance and has since worked in tax preparation with public accounting firms including Moss Adams and Baker Tilly.
Gee says she’s also done financial work for her family’s small coffee roasting business Uccello’s and is one of the co-chairs for the Spokane County Young Democrats.
“When I was elected co-chair there I got to meet a lot of elected officials, and just see really how much work gets done at the local level,” Gee says.
“I was really inspired by Sarah Dixit and other local races, and I heard that Vicky [Dalton] was retiring, so I was doing some research on the auditor’s office and I realized that a lot of the responsibilities and requirements for this job align a lot with what I’ve been preparing and learning and practicing the last few years.
There was nobody running on my side of the aisle, and I think it’s a really important year.
… I have the professional experience and the passion and the willingness to serve my community.”
If elected, Gee says her top priorities include maintaining election integrity, communicating more effectively to taxpayers where their money is spent and expanding voter education efforts.
“A lot of people get really frustrated with their property tax.
The auditor isn’t making those rules, but they are responsible for our annual county financial report, as well as communicating to the public our budget and our spending.
So, I think that there’s a really big opportunity there for expanding the communication to residents and breaking those complex issues down,” she explains.
“I think it’s really important that we expand communication and accessibility to poll watchers, too.”
To do that, she plans to increase the amount of training for election observers that the county offers.
Although Gee has no experience running for elected office and is the youngest candidate in the race, she believes her financial expertise and dedication to transparency is why voters should elect her.
“This job isn’t about who’s been in politics the longest.
It’s about having the right experience and the willingness to work hard and care about this county and our future,” she says.
So far, Gee has been endorsed by Democratic leaders including Spokane County Commissioner Amber Waldref, state Sen.
Marcus Riccelli, and Spokane City Council member Paul Dillon.
DALE WHITAKER, 37
Although Dale Whitaker ultimately lost the Washington Secretary of State election to Steve Hobbs in 2024, he earned the state Republican Party’s endorsement with 66% of delegates favoring him.
He received nearly 53% of the vote in Spokane County, but only earned 40.7% of the overall tally.
He says that election taught him that his values of transparency, accountability and governmental efficiency start locally in positions like county auditor.
Aside from his experience running for office, Whitaker has a bachelor’s degree in accounting, is an IRS enrolled agent for the U.S.
Treasury Department with 18 years of accounting experience, and previously worked as the executive director of We Believe We Vote, a Spokane-based Christian nonprofit that produces voter guides aiming to “make our nation pleasing to Jesus Christ.”
“This is a technical position.
You need technical skills.
We handle almost a billion dollars of expenditures, including all countywide payroll through the auditor’s office, and I think it’s inherently important that we have someone in the office that has experience in accounting,” Whitaker says.
“Realistically speaking, I’m the only one with the qualifications and the experience to do that at any scale.
… I wanted to give people a choice to be able to choose someone who is proven in the area of accounting and is proven in leadership, too.”
If elected, Whitaker says his top three priorities include improving the countywide accounting system, livestreaming the elections office from the day ballots drop to the day they’re done being counted, and building more efficiencies in the licensing office.
“The treasurer has said it himself that [the accounting system] needs work, that it’s been rushed, and it needs to be implemented correctly,” Whitaker says.
“These accounting systems are very, very complex … When I hand you a tool, it needs to work in a way that is intuitive.
And currently, the accounting system, from my understanding, is not intuitive at all.”
While each candidate has said they value transparency, Whitaker argues that he’s the only one who’s been a whistleblower.
“I walked away from $180,000.
That was my paycheck at the time that I was the CFO of Augusta [Precious Metals], and when I uncovered the fraud within the industry, the segment of the industry, not the whole industry,” he says, noting he filed whistleblower complaints in 2018, informing the federal Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that retirees were systematically being sold overpriced coins.
The complaints are still under investigation.
“No one was saying you should do this.
I did it because it was the right thing to do.”
So far, Whitaker has earned endorsements from Republicans including Spokane County Treasurer Mike Volz, state Rep.
Rob Chase, and Al Merkel and Jenny Morton, council members from Spokane Valley and Airway Heights, respectively.
MICHAEL CATHCART, 40
For Spokane City Council member Michael Cathcart, the role of county auditor is one requiring the utmost public trust.
And he believes that he’s the best person to herald that in Spokane.
“We have to have someone who can bring steady, strong leadership, and I have a very strong track record of a transparency-first sort of mindset on the council,” says Cathcart, the most senior member of the Spokane City Council.
“I bring, more than any other candidate in this race, a level of credibility that if I’m saying that I believe the election is secure, I hope that there will be a pretty overwhelming belief that that is true.
And if I’m raising concerns or issues, then hopefully that means that folks will say, ‘Hey, there may be an issue there, and we should take a look at that,’ and it’s not going to become a partisan divide.”
Before he was elected to the City Council in 2019, Cathcart was the executive director for the business advocacy group Better Spokane and also the government affairs director for the Spokane Home Builders Association from 2012-16.
If elected, Cathcart says his main priorities include updating post-election audits to reinforce confidence that elections are secure and accurate, and creating a “live open checkbook” that drills down into county expenses — for example, it would show what legislation authorized a specific expense and exactly what services were provided by those funds — and more voter resources.
“A lot of this is going to come down, obviously, to resources, because right now the county is facing a $30 million deficit, and the auditor’s office has taken a hit every single year for multiple years,” he says.
(Dalton says the county deficit is closer to $25 million.)
“But what I’d like to do in the elections office, beyond the expansion of post-election audits, is a broader voter resource center, especially in the bigger election years.
Potentially even having mobile election resource centers.”
So far, Cathcart has been endorsed by a number of Republicans including U.S.
Rep.
Michael Baumgartner, Spokane County Commissioner Josh Kerns, Spokane County Assessor Tom Konis and county Clerk Tim Fitzgerald (who is also retiring and will be replaced this year).
He’s also picked up endorsements across party lines from Spokane City Council President Betsy Wilkerson and Dalton, which inspired an anonymous attack ad depicting horror movie caricatures of Cathcart, Dalton and Wilkerson.
On June 13, Spokane County GOP Chair Rob Linebarger issued a statement clarifying remarks he made to the Spokesman-Review about the mailer (which he decried) and his disdain for Cathcart’s acceptance of Democratic endorsements, saying a “leader should never accept aid and comfort from the enemy while engaged in battle.”
“I think it’s highly inappropriate and I think he’s off base in his comments about enemies and using kind of traitorous language in his references to me,” Cathcart says, responding to the critique.
“It’s not the kind of values I think that we should be espousing, you know, if you can get elected officials or those who consider themselves to be Democrats to cross over and vote, I think you’re doing something right.”
Analysis
Hover over highlighted words in the article to view the associated bias or fallacy analysis.