Posted on 12/16/2004 11:59:33 AM PST by Publius
Republicans announced plans Thursday morning to sue King County over 573 newly discovered ballots that could change the outcome of the closest governor's race in Washington state history.
The county's Canvassing Board voted Wednesday to prepare the 573 absentee ballots for inclusion in the hand recount, over the objections of Republicans who urged the county to investigate the ballots first.
State GOP Chairman Chris Vance said Thursday the party would seek a court order Thursday afternoon in Pierce County, aimed at slowing down the processing of the previously rejected ballots to allow them to be better tracked and verified.
Specifically, the party wants to stop the county from separating the ballots from their outer envelopes, which Vance said would make it far more difficult to determine where the ballots came from, whether they were stored correctly, and why they were not counted previously.
Democrats applauded and Republicans decried the board's decision Wednesday to move forward with assessing the 573 previously rejected ballots. King County is a Democratic stronghold and the newly discovered ballots have the potential to change the outcome of the election.
"I get to vote, I did it right, and it gets to count," said King County Councilman Larry Phillips, whose ballot was among the 573 mistakenly rejected by election workers.
Election workers will verify signatures on the ballots, and the canvassing board will meet again Monday to decide whether to count the ballots that have been verified. The three-member board postponed a decision on what to do with 22 other newly discovered ballots but will consider that Monday as well, said Bobbie Egan, county elections spokeswoman.
Republican Dino Rossi won the Nov. 2 election over Democrat Christine Gregoire by 261 votes in the first count and by 42 after a machine recount. As of Wednesday he had gained 79 votes in the hand recount for a margin of 121.
The canvassing board voted 2-1 to move forward with recanvassing the 573 ballots. King County Election Director Dean Logan and Democratic King County Councilman Dwight Pelz voted for the recanvassing; voting no was Dan Satterberg, chief of staff for Republican King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng.
Satterberg complained that Logan was rushing, and said the board should take more time to figure out the story behind the newly discovered ballots.
"This is a matter of public integrity, public trust," Satterberg told Logan as they met before a row of TV cameras and reporters. "The appearance to the world that's watching is that you're rushing this through."
Logan said King County election workers made a mistake and he wanted to correct it. The absentee ballots were not counted originally because the voters' signatures had not been scanned into the county's computer system. Election workers should have checked the paper files, but instead the ballots were mistakenly rejected. The error was discovered only after Phillips saw his name on a list of rejected absentee ballots and notified Logan.
"The facts are pretty clear there was a discrepancy in the canvassing of these ballots," Logan said. "There is a record that shows these are validly registered voters who did nothing wrong."
State law allows counties to recanvass ballots and correct errors during a recount if there is "an apparent discrepancy or an inconsistency in the returns."
Election workers had found at least 245 of the 573 voters' signatures on paper registration records by Wednesday afternoon. They will continue checking the records and verify the ballots that belong to registered voters. Workers will then take those ballots out of their security envelopes and return them to the board for a final decision on whether they should be counted.
Vance urged the canvassing board to reject the ballots.
"At some point it just lacks credibility that they keep finding ballots," Vance said. "None of these ballots should be counted."
After the canvassing board vote, Phillips retorted, "I don't care what the chairman of the state Republican party has to say. I did my duty as a citizen and he's going to get out the way ... He has a right to have his vote counted and so do I."
State GOP attorneys are considering their options now. If the King County ballots are included in the recount, and they do end up putting Gregoire on top, lawsuits may ensue.
"It doesn't look like I'm going to do any Christmas shopping anytime soon," said Mark Braden, Rossi's chief lawyer, after leaving the canvassing board meeting.
The board delayed a decision on 22 other ballots- 20 absentee and two provisional - found in the side bins of plastic base units in which polling machines sit. All ballots should have been logged on Election Night and returned in a sealed bag to election headquarters, but these 22 apparently weren't. They've been sitting unsecured at various polling places since the election.
The hand recount is expected to finish by Dec. 22, though there's no deadline set in state law. The governor's inauguration is scheduled for Jan. 12.
Meanwhile, two members of the federal Election Assistance Commission arrived in Washington on Wednesday to observe the recount. Kay Stimson, spokeswoman for the commission, said the members wanted to learn about the historically close recount for a report on "best practices" by the states.
You know, I do spend a lot of time at DU. Not because they're my pals, but to laugh at them. They're idiots. They look stupid. I like laughing at stupid idiots.
Why are they stupid idiots? Because they shriek and whine about fraud for no other reason than that their candidate lost, without any evidence. Because they think that their political opponents always try to steal elections, and therefore any election that's remotely close must have been stolen. And most of all, because whenever a DUer with more sense than his fellows tries to calmly explain this to them, rationally and sanely, they immediately turn on him and accuse him of being a troll from the other side. Doesn't matter how many posts he's made, how many times he's proven his bona fides, how clearly he's one of them... if he contradicts their preconceived worldview they'll rip him to shreds. Those are clearly the acts of the feebleminded.
Hmmm... I'm having the strangest feeling of deja vu.
Well, I do know this. Everybody thinks Washington is one of those nice clean, honest decent places, politically speaking, not like those 'icky' places like Illinois or Texas. That makes it a lot easier to get away with stuff, because everybody thinks you couldn't have done it.
Also, a quick analysis of the extra votes found in the manual recount shows that the higher the number of votes to be counted, the closer the break of the extra votes tends to be to the original count (which we would expect, as the population of votes to be counted enlarges, and statistical anomalies are minimized).
That is, until we get to the biggest cities in the state, which are hard left Democrat, and have broken with the previous percentages widely. Just wait until Pierce County (Tacoma, a crime-ridden, corrupt city if there ever was one) comes in. That county went 46.8 percent for Gregoire, and 50.8 percent for Rossi, but the breakdown of the "new" votes will be at least 60-40, and it wouldn't surprise me if it were 70-30. That sets the stage for King County to come in with a higher percentage of Gregoire votes than in the machine counts, because, hey, it happened other places, too! And I've spent significant time in each of these corrupt cities, so I'm quite familiar with the mentalities found in government there. There really are two Washingtons, the inner city one, and the suburban/rural one. It's my hope that there will be enough suspicion of the way this was handled to cause Democrat voters in the burbs and the sticks to reconsider going on Rat-autovote next election.
It's also my hope that Washington will find a better way to count votes in future elections. And as for having a dog in this fight, in two weeks, I'm moving to Utah. I'd just like to see some justice done for my family members and friends that I leave behind, some of which did vote for Gregoire.
While I support the troops tremendously, I have to say that this proposal was absolutely horrifying.
Like I said after seeing the Snohomish County figures from today, Gregoire won't even need any extra found ballots, the fix was in with the manual recount.
Well put. However, I don't agree with your assessment of these votes, as I think that counting ballots without chain of custody integrity is bad idea.
Wow.
I'm not able to sort out those quotes and commas, so I'm not sure who is being accused, but in any case, I just never realized Chad and Brian were that old!
Wonder if the media will commend them on being made of "sterner stuff"? ROTFLOL
It's not something I've seen in the Dems per se. It's something I've seen in the United States Constitution, the American legal system, and the English common law on which it's based.
Those who are accused of criminal activity always get the benefit of the doubt. Those who are accused of criminal activity are always considered not guilty unless proven otherwise by the evidence. And "well, it's the sort of thing they would do" doesn't meet any evidentiary standard.
How about one more question? Do you honestly believe the recount tactic is anything other than an attempt to steal the election?
Absolutely. I think the recount "tactic" is an attempt to win, not necessarily an attempt to steal. Let me repost something I posted in another thread:
My litmus test for all this sort of stuff is simple: how would I feel if things were the other way around? If everything were exactly the same, all the numbers were exactly the same, but the candidates were switched.
If Gregoire led by 261 in the initial count and by 42 after the machine recount, would I object to a manual recount? Hell, no. I'd demand it. If the Democrats tried to stop the manual recount, how would I feel? Nauseated.
If a bunch of absentee ballots were found that had been improperly rejected in the state's biggest county, which also happened to be heavily Republican, what would I think? Would I think they should be counted? Well, of course. Those ballots were cast by legitimate voters, and mistakes by county officials shouldn't disenfranchise them. If the Democrats tried to prevent them from being counted? They're bastards, trying to steal the election by disenfranchising Republicans.
If that heavily Republican county, being by far the largest in the state, was last to report because of its enormous size and correspondingly enormous number of ballots to count by hand, would I be suspicious? Nope, that's to be expected. If the tabulated votes in that heavily Republican county put Rossi over the top, would I suspect fraud? Nope, that comes with being "heavily Republican".
If the Republicans shelled out the money for a manual recount and it turned out that Rossi really won, should he get his money back? Well, duh. Why the hell should a candidate have to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars to force the state to recognize that he won?
And I daresay that these would be the majority stances on Free Republic... if everything were the other way around.
Do you honestly believe what you are writing?
Every last word.
I found it very interesting that 11,000 votes came into King County a day or so before the deadline for mail-in ballots to arrive. Has anyone checked to see it those ballots were post marked by the post office or run through a postage machine. I can't believe that many ballots would arrive so late as a coincidence. At most, a ballot should be there no later than three business days after the date of the election.
Do you know if anyone has checked on that? This would be especially true if there was only a trickle of votes coming in just before the huge run on the 11,000. That is where the investigation needs to start.
I found it very interesting that 11,000 votes came into King County a day or so before the deadline for mail-in ballots to arrive. Has anyone checked to see it those ballots were post marked by the post office or run through a postage machine. I can't believe that many ballots would arrive so late as a coincidence. At most, a ballot should be there no later than three business days after the date of the election.
Do you know if anyone has checked on that? This would be especially true if there was only a trickle of votes coming in just before the huge run on the 11,000. That is where the investigation needs to start.
All I've ever seen you do on these threads is shill for the Democrats.
No. All you've ever seen me do on [sic] these threads is tell the truth and try to cool down overexcited people who are jumping the gun. But I can understand how that might look like Democratic shilling to a blind partisan like yourself.
You'd be surprised how little I care about your opinion of my credibility, given that your own credibility is nonexistent considering your willingness to accuse people of crimes without evidence.
I refer you to post 183. It disgusts me when people who are supposedly on my side act like a bunch of idiotic DUers. I don't want you for an ally. You embarrass and discredit us all.
I note you admit you are at DU alot. What is your user id ?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.