Posted on 04/29/2005 7:20:52 PM PDT by Mount Athos
Working from lists provided to them in the aftermath of the troubled 2004 election, King County prosecutors have identified 648 felons illegally registered to vote, officials said yesterday.
Illegal votes from felons play a central role in the Republican Party's legal attack on the election of Democrat Christine Gregoire as governor in November. Gregoire edged Republican Dino Rossi by 129 votes after a hand recount of more than 2.8 million ballots, and the GOP is suing to set aside that result in a trial starting May 23 in Wenatchee.
"The government is making our case for us," state Republican chairman Chris Vance said.
The state constitution bars felons from voting unless they have completed their sentences and paid their fines and thus restored their political rights.
The GOP submitted 891 names of King County residents they said were felons who voted illegally in November, and prosecutors ultimately moved to revoke the registrations of 549 of them. Ninety-nine other revocations were triggered by a 105- name list provided by The Seattle Times. The Republicans sent the county 55 more names Wednesday, prosecutors said, and those voters, too, will be investigated.
In the court case, the GOP has listed the names of 726 King County voters the party claims are felons who illegally cast ballots in November. That number includes the voters challenged by prosecutors so far, as well as the additional 55, Vance said.
The Republicans also have claimed 220 illegal felon voters elsewhere, and 389 other types of improper votes -- mainly provisional ballots counted without the required verification of voter eligibility.
In pretrial rulings in the case, Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges has said it won't be enough for the GOP to show the number of illegal votes exceeded Gregoire's margin of victory. Instead, the Republicans must establish that she owes her win to illegal votes, Bridges said.
The Republicans hope to meet that requirement by applying a statistical formula to the illegal votes, subtracting them from the candidates' totals in proportion to the percentage of the overall vote each candidate received in the affected precincts. Gregoire beat Rossi by 58 percent to 40 percent in King County, so she is especially vulnerable to that approach there.
Click Here But the Democrats say the methodology is not allowed under state law. They'll argue the point Monday in a hearing before Bridges.
The parties also are wrangling in Bridges' court over what the GOP has to show in challenging votes by felons.
The Republicans say it should be adequate to document that a voter is a felon and that there's no record in his file of a certificate restoring his rights. Democrats counter that mere absence of a certificate is insufficient to prove that the felon has not earned restoration of his voting rights. That, too, will be argued Monday.
In reviewing the lists submitted to them, King County prosecutors applied the method advocated by the GOP in the court case. In at least a couple of cases, prosecutors said, voters produced certificates after the challenge to their registrations were initiated.
Prosecutors did not press challenges against 46 voters on the original lists whose rights, it turned out, had been restored. For 283 of the listed voters, no record of an adult felony conviction could be found. And in 19 cases, the registrations had already been canceled.
Registration forms require voters to attest that their rights are not in abeyance, but registrations generally can be challenged only after they are entered.
The information systems designed to guard against felon registrations are incomplete and ineffective, a problem state officials say should largely be fixed by a new voter database scheduled to go online by Jan. 1.
Knowingly casting an illegal vote is a crime. But several felon voters have said they were unaware they could not vote.
I'm guessing they did NOT vote Republican.
No need to guess!:)
I, personally, would settle for a revote. That is the only fair way.
Felons, Illegals, the Dead for Hillary in '08!
It's over. I'm not breaking out the pop rocks and soda yet, but I'm pretty sure that Cistern Gregariously fraudulent will not remain Governor for too long.
or just throw out the illegal and fraudulent ballots! what is so hard about that?! I am sure that 647 out of the 648 felon votes alone voted democrat, not to mention the dead etc.
I would predict a Rossi win.....even Dems are getting PI**ED about this...
Democrats cheat. In best Mayor Daley/Palm Beach style, they try their best to steal elections. They stole this one.
Rossi won the first two counts, and only when they applied the Al Gore cherry picking method with liberal felon and cemetery fraud did they win this one. Then they stopped counting.
I don't know if we'll win this in court, but it sure is a fun way to hold their dirty underware up in the air - over and over and over again. Gregoire will go down in the history of Washington state as just another corrupt Democrat.
This survey is incomplete because it doesn't indicate how many of the felons were dead.
Amen.
LOL....no....next report is the number of DEAD who voted....that's coming NEXT week.
LOL....no....next report is the number of DEAD who voted....that's coming NEXT week.
LOL....no....next report is the number of DEAD who voted....that's coming NEXT week.
There is a decent chance tha tRossi would win in a new election. Because of that, the 'Rats will do everything they can to prevent it.
Cue up that little tune for when a player loses the game on the Price Is Right.
Don't be so confident. Washington is a very liberal state. Washington has had a long history with the Democratic party. Washington has had Democrat governor since 1985 and the political makeup of the state includes having both Washington US Senators as Democrats, six of nine Washington Representatives as Democrats, 26 of 49 state senators as Democrats, and 55 of 97 state representatives as Democrats. Remember that 4/5 of the state lives within 50 miles of Seattle. The people of Washington want a Democrat. The fact that Dino Rossi came so close to defeating Christine Gregoire goes to show how poor of a candidate she was. The people, nor the Democratic-party seated courts, are not going to support putting a Republican as governor if they can help it. Unless you've lived in Seattle it is hard to understand how deep liberalism runs in Washington.
On a side note, paradoxically, Washington has one of the best Concealed Weapons Permit laws in the country (makes me sad that I am moving to Illinois which makes California's CWP laws look conservative).
Do your laws allow for recall ..??
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