Posted on 12/23/2004 4:56:01 PM PST by Publius
Democrat Christine Gregoire won the Washington governor's race by 130 votes out of 2.9 million ballots cast, according to final recount results announced Thursday from King County, the last of the state's 39 counties to report.
Hundreds of belatedly discovered ballots helped extend what otherwise would have been just a 10-vote advantage for Gregoire in her topsy-turvy race with Republican Dino Rossi. The first ballot count showed Rossi winning by 261 votes, and a subsequent machine recount had Rossi winning by 42. The latest recount was conducted by hand.
"Wooo-hooo!" exulted state Democratic Party spokeswoman Kirstin Brost moments after the results were announced. "We're very excited. We always believed she would win."
Secretary of State Sam Reed is scheduled to certify the election Dec. 30. After that, the election results probably will be challenged in court, or possibly the Legislature.
State law allows any registered voter to challenge election results, and Republicans have begun asking that elections officials reconsider votes for Rossi that they say were wrongly rejected.
"We're going to be going across the state demanding they make every vote count," Rossi spokeswoman Mary Lane said earlier Thursday.
Since Election Day, Gregoire has gone from favorite to underdog and back to favorite.
A three-term state attorney general, Gregoire, 57, was widely viewed as the anointed successor to Democrat Gov. Gary Locke. Rossi, 45, a real estate agent and former state senator, jumped into the race only after the GOP's first three choices declined to run.
Washington is a blue state - Democrats hold the majority in the Legislature, both U.S. senators are Democrats, and John Kerry won 53 percent of the statewide vote. But Washington voters also flaunt a strong independent streak, and Rossi's sunny message of change caught on with swing voters.
Gregoire and Rossi spent about $6 million each during the campaign, a new state record, and outside groups spent millions more.
After Rossi won the first two counts, Democrats paid $730,000 for the hand recount. By law the state has to repay the party if the recount reverses the results.
"We asked for a hand count because we knew machines make mistakes," Brost said.
During the hand recount, King County election officials discovered that hundreds of ballots had been mistakenly rejected because of problems with how the voters' signatures had been scanned into the computer system. Over Republican objections, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that state law allows county canvassing boards to correct mistakes in the returns, allowing King County to count those 732 ballots.
Election officials found 566 of those ballots to be valid; 311 were for Gregoire, 191 for Rossi. The others either went for Ruth Bennett (26) or didn't have a vote for governor (35) or the person marked multiple candidates (1), or wrote in a candidate (2).
On Thursday morning, Republicans submitted affidavits to King County elections officials from 91 people who voted for Rossi and believe their ballots were erroneously rejected.
Dean Logan, the county's elections director and one of three members on its canvassing board, said those ballots would not be re-evaluated because they had been properly considered and rejected.
Despite Republicans' requests, most auditors statewide have decided not to reconsider rejected ballots, said Corky Mattingly, Yakima County's auditor and president of the Washington State Association of County Auditors.
The auditors agree with Reed, a Republican, that state law prohibits counties from recanvassing after their results have been certified, Mattingly said.
"This is the end," Mattingly said Thursday. "You don't just keep recertifying and recertifying."
Republicans also have accused King County of failing to send absentee ballots to military voters or sending them too late, and they want that mistake corrected, too. Logan said all absentee ballots were sent out on time, including those to military voters.
"You will continue to hear accusations of fraud, of changing rules, of manufactured votes," Logan said Thursday, addressing rumors that have been flying on local blogs and talk radio. "I believe the record shows most of these allegations, if not all of them, are totally untrue."
An election challenge could go through state courts or possibly to the state Legislature - experts disagree on what the law says. If the losing side alleges possible violations of the equal protection clause in the U.S. Constitution, the election could end up in federal court.
"The (state) Supreme Court just changed the rules," state GOP Chairman Chris Vance said Wednesday. "Now we will aggressively fight by those new rules."
If further legal wrangling holds up the Jan. 12 inauguration of a new governor, Locke may have to stay. Locke has made it clear he is not interested in hanging around.
"The bigger question is why all counties in WA state aren't required by law to certify their official results by the same date."
Exactly. As I remarked on another thread, this is a game of showdown poker and King County is picking through the deck to assemble a winning hand after the other players have shown their hands.
Why were thousands of military ballots thrown out because of a late post mark[ a RAT ''mistake''] when these ballots were allowed in after ''finding'' them a month and a half after the election!? I'd be embarressed to take office this way if I was that RAT woman! This is a terrible scandal for the state of Washington and a travisty of justice!
Let's not go the route of the idiots on DU. If more people voted for her, that's democracy. Move across the border to a red state if you can't live with it.
Ballots shouldn't be tossed just because some election official screwed up the first time around.
I guess we will have to get busy and change the law regardless of who wins.
Get it?
One correction, our esteemed Publius: Governor Locke stays until a new Governor is sworn in. The Lt. Governor only serves if the Governor dies or is incapacitated.
Wow! GREAT analogy.
But Locke has no intention of hanging around. He's made it clear he'll resign, if necessary. It's almost a certainty that Brad Owen would be acting governor.
Isn't that just typical of (useless Governor) Locke: resign rather than stay and do his civic duty serving his state.
Can you even imagine the outcry from the RATS if the Republicans had ''discovered'' ballots almost two months after an election in a ''warehouse'' somewhere, and demanded they be allowed into the legal ballot count?
As we view the sad mess in this state, let us think about whether we have the gumption to do what now needs to be done.
Look for the hidden message.
pass it on....!
They can't. They already own it.
Outside of Seattle and Tacoma, WA is a pretty much red state. Farmers, rural residents, residents of smaller cities and towns across the state have supported Seattle/Tacoma welfare bandits, "consultants" (all RATS) hired to figure out Seattle's freeway problems who never come up with a solution other than "we need another billion-buck study," million-dollar bike paths through Seattle that no one uses, illegals, street people, free bus service in Seattle, overstaffed and overpaid social services offices, and public payrolls weighted down with "employees" who never work.
Reason all this goes on and on endlessly is that the RATS have been in power for more than 20 years. And here we go again.
Ain't that the truth.
I think allot of people are just upset that it was democrat officials that decided which votes would be counted. All the other counties refused to reconsider previously rejected ballots. Yet King County decided that they could change the rules and count more ballots. And despite being called newly discoverd ballots. They knew those voters had problems with their registration back in August and contacted most of them to correct the problem before the election, yet the voters either didn't respond and failed to make any reasonable effort to ensure that they were legally able to vote. It was only several weeks after the election that they made sure they were properly registered for the next election. They should have been re-examined during the second recount like all the other counties done with their ballots.
So allowing King County to change their own rules after the election to count previously rejected ballots, while not counting Military ballots, or ballots that they know are more likely to be republican has turned the whole process into a sham. If they don't re-evaluate all the rejected ballots in all the counties, then shouldn't count any of them. It's a matter of fairness and equality under election law.
Also it should be noted that a hand recount has a higher margin of error than a machine recount. The margin of error for counting over 2 million votes by hand would be well over 1000 votes. So the rusult is even less accurate and less trustworthy. Human's are more likely to make mistakes, and are more likely to apply their personal bias. There is hundreds of Rossi votes that won't be counted because democrats in the counties decided they wouldn't. So having biased democrats countroling the vote counting and controling the rules for which onces count. The process can be viewed as a joke by most fair minded people watching it. The only way to resolve such a close election were both candidates can claim victory within the margin of error is by following the rules set up for tied elections, or by having a new election that will not be tainted with charges of incompetence, fraud, and corruption.
Time was that you could easily see Rainier from Seattle, and that the Tacoma aroma was something you just lived with. Time was that Seattlites were friendly to outsiders, and glad to welcome people, as long as you could weather the black ice on I-5.
Time was, Washington got overrun with folks from outside wanting to make it all sophisticated and polished. The emerald city does have, after all, a namesake of a gemstone known for occlusion, corruption, and for more deaths from mine to market than most other stones.
Sounds like the pollution has spread to other endeavors, and that the fog has become biological in King County.
Sure am glad not to live there anymore, no matter how pretty it is, or, was.
The dems have turned our country upside down. This kind of outright fraud is accepted simply because it is dem fraud. Then you have nuts like showed up on Hannity & Colmes tonight claiming that GWB did not receive more votes than ole Flip-Flop. Says the election will be challenged and that Bush may not be inaugurated in Jan. He made my blood boil. Did anyone else sse that? Talk about your tinfoil hat.
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