This is so outrageous it certainly will be
reversed on appeal if these tactics change the vote totals in favor of
Gregoire. Judge Lum should be impeached and removed from office. This is
a good example of the attitude too many judges have that they can ignore
or overrule the law to reach a "desirable" result. That's the "living constitution"
in action. - JR
JOHN FUND ON
THE TRAIL
Florida Northwest
Will Democrats steal the
Washington governorship?
Monday, November 29, 2004
12:01 a.m.
The country dodged a repeat
of the 2000 Florida election debacle this year because George W. Bush's
margin in the decisive state of Ohio was 136,000 votes. But the one out
of 50 Americans who live in Washington state are living through a Florida-style
nightmare, with Republican Dino Rossi clinging to a 42-vote lead over Democrat
Christine Gregoire in the governor's race after a machine recount of 2.8
million ballots. In the latest example of why this country needs to clean
up and clarify its sloppy election systems, Douglas firs substitute for
palm trees as the backdrop.
In Seattle's King County alone
the vote counting so far has featured such anomalies as 10,000 ballots
being mysteriously discovered nearly two weeks after Election Day, election
officials "enhancing" hundreds of unreadable optical-scan ballots, and
a judge allowing political partisans to selectively track down voters who
cast questionable provisional ballots to see if they could turn them into
valid votes. Ms. Gregoire gained several hundred votes through such maneuvers,
so she has now declared her intention to pay for a hand recount of some
of the state's precincts to see if she can take the lead. If a selective
recount changes the overall winner, the state would pay for a laborious
hand recount of all the votes The process could drag on past Christmas
and might eventually have to be settled by the state Supreme Court. Gov.
Gary Locke is scheduled to leave office on Jan. 12, but wags are already
joking he shouldn't be pack his bags too soon.
![]()
The trouble began when it became
clear the race was so close it wouldn't be settled by the ballots counted
on election night. Washington allows absentee ballots--used by 70% of the
voters this year--to be counted as long as they are postmarked by Election
Day. Thus everyone knew that the way late absentee and provisional votes
(cast by people not on the registration rolls, and subject to later verification)
were counted might wind up swinging the election.
That set off a legal fracas
over the 929 people in heavily Democratic King County whose provisional
ballots hadn't been counted because of mismatched
or missing signatures. Democrats demanded the names and addresses of those
voters so they could contact them and correct the errors. County officials
responded that in requiring that all 50 states offer provisional ballots
Congress had stipulated that such votes remain private. Republican lawyers
argued that having partisans scavenge for votes would increase the potential
for fraud.
But
Superior Court Judge Dean Lum said such arguments weren't as important
as the need to make sure every vote counted--an echo of Florida. A full
10 days after the election, while absentee votes were still being counted,
he ordered election officials to give the names and addresses of the provisional
voters to the Democratic Party. Judge Lum did express regret that the judiciary
was being "whipsawed in the middle" of a bitter partisan dispute and asked
to "micromanage an election." But then he proceeded to do precisely that
by allowing partisan workers the opportunity to mine flawed ballots after
the election, for the first time in the 20 years that Washington has used
provisional ballots.
Democrats spent the next three
days knocking on doors and speed-dialing voters. Ryan Bianchi, communications
assistant for Ms. Gregoire, made it clear how blatantly partisan the approach
was. Democratic volunteers asked if voters had cast ballots for Ms. Gregoire.
"If they say no, we just tell them to have a nice day," he told the Seattle
Times. Only if they say yes, did the Democrats ask if they want to make
their ballot valid. Republicans played catch-up by belatedly using their
own phone banks to call up voters and identify ballots that might fall
their way if made valid. In the end Democrats turned in some 600 written
oaths from provisional voters and Republicans about 200.
Those votes helped narrow
Mr. Rossi's eventual lead to 261 votes as the late absentee votes were
finally counted and the results certified on Nov. 17. Then the state began
a mandatory machine recount. Once again, King County was the center of
controversy. More than 700 previously uncounted ballots were added to the
county's total after election officials "enhanced"
them to better divine voter intent. When optical scan machines didn't accept
ballots, workers would fill in ovals on ballots or create duplicate ballots
if they felt the voter had meant to register a choice. Hanging chads, meet
empty ovals. Through this process, Ms. Gregoire gained 245 votes in King
County, dwarfing the shifts to either candidate in any other county.
Such creative counting brought
Mr. Rossi's lead down to 42 votes, a critical threshold to justify further
recounts and litigation. Former governor Booth Gardner, a Democrat, told
a press conference last week that he thought Ms. Gregoire should concede
if the final recount margin had been 100 votes or more. But at 42 votes
he now feels a hand recount is appropriate.
But is it? It certainly isn't
more precise, as the fiasco of Florida's chad counting proved in 2000.
"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," Dean Logan,
the elections director of King County and a Democrat, admitted to reporters.
"Every time you have human judgment and frailty enter into the process
it will change the result," agrees Bruce Chapman, a Republican who served
as Washington's secretary of state before becoming director of the U.S.
census in the 1980s. In an interview, he said a hand recount will likely
result in bitter litigation that will see the courts intervene to settle
the dispute. John Carlson, a Seattle talk show host who was the GOP nominee
for governor in 2000, worries that "this state's reputation for clean government
may not survive the bitter struggle that appears about to begin."
![]()
There but for the grace of Ohio
voters went the rest of us this election year. The country dodged the bullet
of another presidential election through litigation as thousands of lawyers
from both parties stood ready to challenge the results. But Washington
state's mess should remind us that it is still imperative to clean up our
election systems, better educate voters, develop more precise rules on
how provisional ballots should be treated, and discourage judges from "interpreting"
the election rules in creative ways that second-guess the intent of legislators.
If we ignore the lessons of Florida in 2000 and the lessons from Washington
state this year, we will continue to play a form of Russian roulette with
our vote count and make inevitable an eventual repeat of 2000.
Mr. Fund is author of "Stealing
Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy" (Encounter Books, 2004),
which is available from the OpinionJournal
bookstore.
Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones
& Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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