An Open Letter To The New York Times
Sound Politics
One month ago, the New York Times urged Washington state to "count every vote" in our governor's race, repeating the slogan so popular among Democratic activists and editorial writers.
We now know, thanks to investigations by the Republican party, the BIAW, a building trades association, and individual bloggers, particularly Stefan Sharkansky of Sound Politics, that some counties in Washington state followed the Times' advice. For example, King County, which includes the Democratic stronghold of Seattle, counted votes from dead people, from felons, and from hundreds of provisional voters without checking. All in all, King County counted nearly 2,000 more votes than voters.
King County did not quite count every vote. They did not count 22 ballots found in voting machines after the election, and they did not count some military ballots that soldiers and Marines in Iraq received after the election. But they came close.
And so how do Washington's voters feel about this effort to "count every vote?" Polls show that a large majority of the state's voters do not consider Christine Gregoire's victory legitimate and want a re-vote. This mess provides more evidence that the right slogan is not "count every vote," but "count every legitimate vote — correctly."
Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.
seanet.com
(Here's my earlier post on the editorial.)
seanet.com
Posted by Jim Miller
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