So of all the web sites that have devoted countless attention since November to presidential election analysis, recounts (Ohio), fraud rumors (Ohio/Florida), and so on, how many of them have even bothered to comment on the State of Washington governors' race?
Quoting from an e-mail from a conservative friend (who sometimes comments here pseudonymously):
"Each count, King County kept finding new ballots that they didn't know they had before. The simple fact that this happened so frequently means that somebody should either be fired (if it was accidental) or thrown in jail (if it was intentional fraud). Problems that we know and either the Rossi campaign or soundpolitics.com can prove:
Dead people voting
Felons voting
Illegal immigrants voting
People voting twice
Several hundred ballots left unsecured for two weeks
Five thousand (I think) unaccounted ballots in King County. That is, 5,000 more ballots than voters.
Two thousand unaccounted voters. That is, 2000 people recorded as having voted, but for which there is no ballot (this is found at the precinct level, where you might have a precinct reporting 200 voters but only 195 ballots)
Even if the unaccounted ballots belong to the unaccounted voters, there are still far more unaccounted ballots than the margin.
Military ballots were sent out later than law allows and there is some evidence that King County tried to cover it up."
All this seems to me to be significantly more newsworthy than anything that came out of Ohio. But then I guess We had to wait eight hours in the rain! is more compelling as a human interest story than the wonkish minor details of actually getting the victor right.
(The same sites that got so deep into Ohio/Florida minutaue didn't spend much time or space on the North Carolina snafu either, and given that this was a computer glitch so bad that it resulted in a necessary revote, that probably blows Ohio and Washington both out of the water. But since you can cast it in "Republicans cheated!" "No, Democrats cheated!" terms...)
Posted by Matt Bruce at January 11, 2005 11:35 AMI have no idea, but soundpolitics is no more reliable than your average DailyKos Diary poster.
I've barely paid attention to the Ohio stuff. The Secretary of State showed his hand before the election that he was willing to bend the rules six ways come Sunday to help the Bush campaign (of which he was cochairman), it sucks, but as long as it's a political office we're going to risk shenanigans like this. I figured that the catalog of problems would come out later and I'd wait until everything was checked out until making any conclusions.
Posted by: M.S. at January 11, 2005 03:20 PMMilitary ballots were sent out later than law allows and there is some evidence that King County tried to cover it up.
Speak of the devil, a diary poster at Daily Kos made a few phone calls to investigate this specific claim.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2005/1/12/145556/596
Posted by: M.S. at January 12, 2005 12:17 PMPicked up by the Seattle Times:
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2002149473_ballots13m.html
Posted by: M.S. at January 13, 2005 09:44 AM