Three times since the counting of mail-in ballots began, the King County election board has stumbled upon unexpected caches of votes in Washington State’s eternal gubernatorial contest. The first put Democrat Christine Gregoire close enough to demand a machine recount. The second gave her a manual recount. Third time looks like the charm that will move her to Olympia. Nearly 600 “valid but previously rejected” ballots have mysteriously appeared. The story is that a clerk didn’t look in the right place for on-file signatures and mistakenly determined that the voters weren’t registered.
None of the other 38 counties has had any “magical mystery ballots” (as Sound Politics, the place to follow the twists and turns of this farce, calls them), much less three sets. The state Republican chairman isn’t being hyperbolical when he says that these strange events can only be the product of “either gross incompetence or vote fraud”.
I would bet on both, but it doesn’t really matter. Washingtonians are tired of this election. Republicans are just as tired as anyone, and their reaction to having the election snatched away in this dubious fashion will be a couple of days of complaining followed by stolid acceptance of the purported outcome.
That is probably the right response. Winning a governorship isn’t worth months of political and legal turmoil. It’s sadly true that many Democrats don’t feel that way, but we won’t improve matters by adopting their “to the death” mentality. What Republicans need to do instead is learn the lessons of this race and use them to form the basis for electoral reform.
As I have argued before, the clearest lesson is that near universal voting by mail is pernicious. The King County story illustrates how easy it is for mistakes, deliberate or unintentional, to undermine the reliability of the canvass. That problem merely compounds the principal objection: that mail ballots are not secret, stultifying one of the key protections for the democratic (but not, these days, Democratic) process.
Congress ought to outlaw the practice except in cases of clear necessity (
Update (12/15/04): John Fund, writing in the OpinionJournal Political Diary (subscription only but well worth $3.95 a month), counts a larger number of strange ballot discoveries in King County:
Voting Late and Often in Gregoire Country
The Washington Supreme Court yesterday unanimously rejected a Democratic lawsuit that called for some 15,000 invalid ballots to be reexamined as part of the statewide recount of the nation’s closest race for governor in decades. At last count, Republican Dino Rossi was leading Democrat Christine Gregoire by 104 votes out of 2.8 million cast.
But Democrats are optimistic they will prevail because yesterday for the seventh time election officials in Seattle’s liberal King County found extra votes they say should be counted. Monday’s treasure trove consisted of 561 absentee ballots that clerks say were wrongly disqualified. That number was revised upward to 573 ballots on Tuesday. Then, late yesterday evening, another pile of 22 previously undiscovered ballots were found at a recount facility. “Those 22 ballots should absolutely not be counted,” says Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance. “They have not been in a secure location. There is no postmark on them. We will absolutely contest those votes.”
Bill Huennekens, King County’s superintendent of elections, confirmed to reporters that 22 ballots were found but he had no information on whether or not the ballots had been secured.
John Carlson, a talk show host who was the GOP candidate for governor in 2000, says his callers have become deeply cynical about the recount process. “One said that King County might as well stand for Kiev County in Ukraine,” he said.
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