Ravenwood - 01/13/05 06:45 AM
One of the most ignored stories of 2004 is how Democrats in Washington State stole the Gubernatorial election. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a timeline of events, which itself is pretty damning. But the Wall Street Journal takes a look at the most damning evidence.
In December, officials in King County, which includes Seattle, discovered 573 "erroneously rejected" absentee ballots, plus another 150 uncounted ones that showed up in a South Seattle warehouse. There were reports that hundreds of voters were registered in storage rental facilities and private mailboxes, that felons had voted, and that military ballots were sent out too late to be counted. Then we learned that several hundred provisional ballots had simply been fed into voting machines, making it impossible to authenticate their legality. Now it turns out the number of votes cast in King County exceeds the total number of voters by about 1,800.They also report that according "to a KING-TV poll, 53% of Washingtonians believe Mr. Rossi won the election, against 36% who think Ms. Gregoire won it. Washingtonians also want a revote by a similar margin." Still, the WSJ notes that unless fraud can be proven, the revote that GOP candidate Dino Rossi wants isn't the best option.
The Democrats did not "steal" anything. They simply made certain that everyone's vote counted- something the Republicans were more than willing to deny as long as they won. Of course, if Rossi had been declared the winner, we'd be having the same argument in reverse, wouldn't we?
The sad truth is that there are no winners in a situation such as this. Washington, like Oregon, is a blue state (west of the Cascades) and a red state (east of the Cascades) in one. No matter how well of effectively this matter is settled, someone would have been crying foul.
Posted by: Jack Cluth at January 13, 2005 7:25 AMCome on Jack. Dead people voting? More votes than voters? Subjectively determining the "intent" of the voter for so-called "undervotes"? They weren't counting every vote, they were counting votes that weren't there.
The first two counts had Rossi the winner. They the Dems forced the state to count ballots by hand. The hand count of machine punch cards is actually MORE prone to error than the machine recounts. These are ballots that were MEANT to be counted by machine not by inept campaign workers.
Posted by: Ravenwood at January 13, 2005 7:42 AMJack, I honestly find it incredible that anyone, even a presumed Democrat, is satisfied with what has happened in Washington. Doesn't the fact that only 36% of the citizens of Washington believe that she is the actual winner of the race mean something to you? This type of hypocrisy is why I vote Republican now after having voted Democratic all my life. Democrats have lost all sense of shame and responsibility for their actions. Nothing is forbidden to those who "know" they are in the right. Real scary stuff coming out of the Democratic Party these days: speech codes that turns opinion into crime, a spineless weathervane like Kerry for President to lead the soldiers he spent his political life smearing. No shame.
If Gregoire prevails it will be to the detriment of the Democratic Party. Oh, and in case you missed it, Rossi did win, twice.
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