That is old news. Rossi prevailed inspite of the King county officials "interpreting" voter intent, by 42 votes.
This is not:
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
By JOHN CARLSON
GUEST COLUMNIST
What's the difference between Christine Gregoire and me?
I lost one count for governor. Gregoire has now lost two.
Yes, it was close -- a photo finish. But it was not, as she is telling people, a tie. Dino Rossi won it fairly, he won it squarely and he won it twice. Yet Gregoire is calling for a third count done by hand because she wants "accuracy."
Actually, she wants 43 votes. And a hand count is easier to get there, because hand counts are less accurate than machines. Those who understand the process of running an election, including our two previous secretaries of state, agree with Democrat Dean Logan, the head of King County's elections office, who said, "When you're talking about close to 900,000 pieces of paper, I think the machine count is going to be more accurate than a manual count." By the way, though no one's saying it out loud, it's also easier to cheat with hand counts.
Are machines perfect? No, which is why a recount was necessary in the first place. Yet after nearly 2.9 million votes were recounted, the results were almost the same. The main reason Rossi's margin slipped from 261 to 42 is that King County "enhanced" votes rejected by the machines. In 38 of the state's 39 counties, only 208 net votes were added to either Rossi or Gregoire in the recount. Then came King County, which represents a third of the electorate. Gregoire netted a gain of 245 votes -- more than the rest of the state for both candidates combined.
Gregoire is no longer acting like someone who wants "every vote counted"; she's acting like someone who wants the votes counted again and again, in different ways if necessary, to produce the results she's almost but not quite getting.
More than a political race is at stake here. Washington long has been known as a clean place in which to do politics, but that reputation evaporates if Rossi becomes the only candidate in state history (and one of the only ones in U.S. history) to win an election on the first count, win it again on the second and then be denied the oath of office by a third count that used a less reliable method for counting the ballots.
The anger would extend far beyond the Republican Party. A KING-5 poll shows that 66 percent of the people believe Rossi is the winner. Only 24 percent -- less than the Democrat base vote in Washington -- believe Gregoire won the race. Even some newspapers that endorsed her are now calling on her to put the state's interests ahead of her own and concede the race.
That's not too surprising. Former Secretary of State Ralph Munro said last week that he would have urged Rossi to concede and unify the state if he, rather than Gregoire, lost both counts. I would have done the same. It's not like he or she isn't there to fight another day. John Thune lost a U.S. Senate race by 513 (suspicious) votes in South Dakota in 2002, only to come back this year and defeat Tom Daschle. Maria Cantwell was bounced out of Congress in 1994 after one term. She came back in 2000 and now sits in the Senate.
But never mind the candidates for a moment. A third count won't erase doubts about the results, it will raise them, and that hurts Washington state. It means lawyers and judges ultimately decide the winner, not the voters. Gregoire should do what a real leader would do: Instruct her party that the race is over, concede the race to Rossi so he can form a government and then regroup and re-emerge later. There's life after losing a governor's race, I promise.
John Carlson hosts an afternoon talk show on KVI radio in Seattle; jcarlson@fisherradio.com. He was the Republican nominee for governor in 2000.