No matter how solid the proof that the number of illegal ballots cast in the Washington State gubernatorial election vastly exceeded Christine Gregoire’s margin of “victory”, the odds are against a court-ordered re-vote. Judges don’t rush to overturn elections. Most likely, the State Supreme Court will find a way to construe the pertinent laws very narrowly and will dismiss the Republican challenge. What happens after that?
According to one poll, 62 percent of Washingtonians, including 45 percent of Democrats, favor doing the election over again. Outraged Republicans will be tempted to combine those numbers with their own anger and adopt “Governor Fraudatoire” as their primary political target. Venting in that fashion will be emotionally satisfying. Politically, however, it would be pointless and self-defeating.
Let’s not forget that the leaders of the Democratic Party, in the aftermath of the 2000 Presidential race, proclaimed that public rejection of the Supreme Court’s alleged “selection” of George W. Bush as President would fuel future victories for their party. How did that strategy work? Here is Byron York’s appraisal, written the day after the 2002 elections:
One of the major themes of last night’s vote count was the complete failure of the “Florida anger” strategy as a motivating force for Democrats. It didn’t work in Florida, and it didn’t work around the country.
In February 2001, in a Washington hotel ballroom, Terry McAuliffe, the newly elected chairman of the Democratic National Committee, gave a speech that worked a crowd of party workers into a near-frenzy. “We will transform the anger about Florida into energy about politics,” McAuliffe said, his voice rising to a shout. “We will prove there is victory after denial, democracy after Florida, Daschle after Lott, Gephardt after Hastert, and justice after the United States Supreme Court. We will give the American people a Congress they can be proud of, and we will show George Bush the door in 2004!”
The anger in the room that day bordered on the irrational. And so did McAuliffe’s strategy. Driven by his own and his top aides’ frustration over Florida, McAuliffe made defeating Jeb Bush his party’s number one goal. Doing that, he believed, would have a “devastating” effect on George W. Bush and help Democrats win the White House two years from now. Just last Sunday, McAuliffe flatly predicted that Jeb Bush would lose and said, “We are going to win Florida, which is going to set us up very nicely for 2004.”
Well, not quite. Screaming about the supposed unfairness of the last election isn’t a sufficient reason for anyone to vote for you in this one. Taking the McAuliffe road in Washington State will almost certainly lead to the same sort of failure.
If we want good to come out of this evil, it is important to see this year’s election mismanagement not as a partisan windfall but as an opportunity for fundamental reform directed toward minimizing the risk of future fraud. (I’ve already offered my own suggestions for concrete improvements.) If Democrats resist cleaning up the process, that is, if they act like their party has a vested interest in fraud, that will be a legitimate issue in 2006 and 2008.
My hope, naturally, is that everybody will embrace ending shady election practices as essential to preventing American democracy from degenerating to a Third World level. My expectations are less rosy. The common impression, which has empirical data to confirm it, is that Democrats benefit disproportionately from election illegalities. It’s hard to deny that –
Democratic leaders behave as if they believe more Democrats commit vote fraud. Nearly always, when the two parties split on election rules, the Republicans want more checks on fraud and the Democrats want less. The infamous 1993 “Motor Voter” Act, which did so much to make fraud easier was opposed almost entirely by Republicans and had been vetoed by the first President Bush. I don’t say that all supporters of the
legislation . . . knew that it would make vote fraud easier, but some of them did. Like the anonymous liberal activists, they see some fraud as a reasonable price for getting more representation for the victim groups they identify with.
It is telling, I think, that there is one group, military voters, for which Democrats tend to prefer tougher rules and the Republicans easier rules. Military voters generally back Republicans, at least in recent years. That Democratic leaders prefer rules that make cheating easier (for everyone except military voters) is understandable if they think they gain from the cheating, but hard to explain otherwise.
So we can expect at least some Democrats (and the media outlets that parrot them) to throw roadblocks in the way of reform. Naturally, they won’t argue candidly, like the “liberal activists” cited in the post linked above, that stealing votes is a legitimate way to empower the downtrodden. Instead, we can expect misdirection, beginning with amnesia about what happened in King County last year. Look forward to plenty of puff pieces on Christine Gregoire’s rise from poverty – the first member of her family to attend college, etc. – accompanied by credulous repetition of her incredible assertion that the Washington vote count was “a model to the rest of the nation and the world at large about how an election system, as close as this one is, can be done with the highest of quality”, indeed, “an inspiration”. We’ll be told that the votes were counted three times, not that heavily Democratic King County had nearly 2,000 more votes than voters [note update] and numerous other irregularities (too many to list here but chronicled at Sound Politics. Even less likely is an analysis of whether the final, manual recount was in fact more accurate than the preceding machine counts that gave the nod to Republican Dino Rossi.
Also predictable is a burst of equivalence: So funny things happened in King County; what about Florida in 2000, huh? The quick answer is that we favor honest elections everywhere. If Democrats believe that Washington and Florida represent two sides of the same dirty coin, that just shows that reform is a neutral idea, not a GOP plot.
The longer answer is that the central problem in the Florida count (leaving aside fictitious claims of “vote suppression” and the supposed inability of Democrats in Palm Beach County to comprehend a ballot designed by a Democratic official) was the difficulty of counting punch card ballots with sufficient precision to resolve an extremely tight contest, a problem compounded by the effects of handling (the infamous “hanging chads”). The proper corrective measure is better technology, which the state has been working to install.
Fundamental to Washington’s debacle are systemic problems, not imperfect technology. Most significant is the fact that 70 percent of the votes last year were cast by mail. However convenient that may be, mail-in ballots carry no assurance of secrecy and facilitate mischief of all types. There’s no way to be sure that what is marked on the paper represents the free choice of an eligible citizen rather than the product of intimidation, bribery, forgery or other fraud. Moreover, the wide distribution of unmarked ballots (they are mailed to over a million households) makes it easier for any dishonest election worker to obtain the raw materials for manufacturing votes.
What went wrong in each state was different, and different solutions are called for. It makes sense to try to solve both. Certain liberals, I fear, would rather deal with neither.
If Christine Gregoire retains her office, let’s congratulate her – and work to see that no office holder will have to labor under the same taint in the future.
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