Sound Politics - Recount battle
The Rossi campaign released the following statement late yesterday in response to the Democrats' shenanigans
As you know, Dino won the recount for the governor’s race on Wednesday, but Christine Gregoire is not willing to accept the results. While we’re waiting to see what Gregoire’s next step is, I wanted to bring up a few points:
Hand-count accuracy
Gregoire argues that the only way to get true accuracy is with a hand count. But both Republicans and Democrats – including former Republican Secretary of State Ralph Munro and current King County Elections head Dean Logan, a Democrat – agree that the more often ballots get handled, the more the ballots are degraded quality-wise, and the more chance there is for human error.
Gregoire knows that what the experts say is true: ballots deteriorate the more they are handled, making an inaccurate count more likely. She wants a recount process that will yield less-accurate results. The two machine counts (plus a partial hand-recount in King County) didn’t go her way, so now she wants to try something else.
The holes in Gregoire’s “count every vote” mantra.
Gregoire and her allies have been repeating the phrase “count every vote” over and over again. But a closer look at her actions over the past weeks reveals she’s more interested in counting only those votes that were likely cast for her in King County than in truly counting every vote across the state.
From the time this process started, Gregoire has been solely focused on the votes in King County. You can read in the letter the Democratic Party lawyer sent to Sam Reed on Wednesday afternoon that Gregoire is most concerned with maximizing her vote in King. The letter even goes so far as to suggest that votes in other counties such as Snohomish, Franklin and Adams should be questioned. In other words, as long as the votes favor Gregoire, Gregoire’s fine with them. If the votes don’t favor Gregoire, she wants them thrown out.
Cherry-picking votes
Gregoire and the state Democratic Party have indicated they may go ahead with a strategy of choosing only selected precincts to be hand re-counted. This cherry-picking strategy again undercuts the mantra of “count every vote.” It seems clear that Gregoire is not interested in counting every vote accurately – she instead wants to game the system and manipulate the vote count until she gets a result she likes.
Today on Seattle’s 710 KIRO radio, state Democratic Party chairman Paul Berendt claimed that the Democrats would probably have to go with the cherry-picking strategy because the Democratic Party can’t afford to pay for a statewide hand recount. The host mentioned that if the election result is overturned as a result of the Democrats’ cherry-picking strategy, state law requires a taxpayer-funded full state hand recount, and taxpayers would have to foot the bill. Berendt’s response was: “Democracy ain’t cheap.”
How much more does Gregoire want?
So far, in both the first count and the recount, Gregoire has gotten virtually everything she wanted: She succeeded in changing the rules so the Democratic Party could hand-deliver provisional ballots with questionable signatures to the King County Elections Department. She benefited from a partial hand-counting process in King County that clearly favored her. Yet she was unable to manipulate enough votes to overturn the result of the election, so now she appears ready to drag the state through a third count.
Governor-Elect Rossi is prepared for whatever strategy Gregoire chooses, and will not stand idly by while she attempts to game the system. We believe that Governor-Elect Rossi will continue to maintain the lead in a fair and accurate recounting of the votes. So the question is, how far is Christine Gregoire willing to go, and at what point will she realize she has lost this race concede?
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