The good news on Thanksgiving Eve is that the recount in the Washington gubernatorial race is complete, and Dino Rossi is the winner by 42 votes. Whether the Democrats will demand further recounting remains to be seen, but it is, for now, a welcome landslide.
The discouraging news is that the county-by-county results spell finis for my former home state’s reputation for high quality political procedures.
Consider these interesting facts: As of noon today, the recount had resulted in only a de minimis change in the initial totals. With 38 of 39 counties, representing 69 percent of the total votes cast, reporting, Rossi’s margin was up by a net of 26 votes. He had gained 722, Christine Gregoire 696. The increases mostly represented ballots that the voting machines failed to tabulate on the first go-round but accepted the second time, plus the effects of minor human errors.
Then came King County. Based on the pattern everywhere else, there should have been about 640 newfound ballots, of which one could have expected Gregoire to receive roughly 58 percent (her overall percentage in the county), or about 370 new votes to Rossi’s 270. Instead, over 900 additional ballots appeared, 62 percent for Gregoire, giving her almost enough to close the gap.
I don’t wish to sound paranoid, but how likely is it that the machine count in King County was that seriously out of line with the rest of the state? Suspicions founded on these quick stats are supplemented by reports of odd goings-on in the counting room. As reported by the invaluable Sound Politics, Republican observers complained repeatedly about refusals to count ballots clearly marked for Rossi, inadequate security for ballot boxes, missing ballots and alterations of ballots by pro-Gregoire election workers. We can expect to learn much more about all this if Rossi vs. Gregoire turns into 2004’s Bush vs. Gore.
The next step, if the Democrats choose to pursue it, is a recount by hand, where the opportunities for partisan “improvement” of the results are far greater than in a machine tabulation. Republican happiness over the apparent outcome thus has to remain a bit tentative. Here is a sobering summing up from Sound Politics’ Jim Miller:
And if Gregoire wins this second recount, will I consider her win illegitimate? Almost certainly yes. Not because of the glitches in the recounts, which at times almost seemed intended to create Republican suspicions, but because of what I have begun to call “distributed vote fraud”, the vote fraud committed by individuals, and made easier by our lax election laws. (I described the problem here and here.)
Here is my guesstimate again. If a Democrat wins a statewide election in Washington by fewer than 100 votes, then their margin almost certainly came from fraudulent votes. If they win by fewer than 1,000 votes, then their margin probably came from fraudulent votes. I can’t prove those numbers are correct, of course, but neither can anyone who disagrees prove that they are incorrect. We simply don’t know how many fraudulent votes are cast in our elections, but we can be almost certain that they benefit Democrats, net.
Comments