Washington

by Cliopatria

From Washington state, the Dems report that the results from the hand recount in King County (Seattle) show that Dem Christine Gregoire has been elected governor--by 8 votes.

This excludes the 700-odd ballots from King County that election officials mistaken excluded and GOP officials successfully sued to keep uncounted. Since other Republican-leaning counties had, in fact, counted such ballots, if the state Supreme Court upholds the GOP, Gregoire's lead will probably grow a bit, as the GOP counties have to, in effect, de-count some of their ballots.

A dozen years ago, Georgia senator Wyche Fowler was ultimately defeated because of a peculiar Peach State law that required the winning candidate to receive more than 50% of the vote. Fowler fell just short of that margin in the November election, with a Libertarian candidate pulling around 1 percent of the vote. In a December runoff without the Libertarian, Republican Paul Coverdell edged Fowler. State Dems promptly repealed the law.

If such a law existed in Washington, a runoff would have occurred, since neither Gregoire nor Rossi polled even 49%, much less 50%. I thought the GA law was a bad one in 1992, but the Washington race leads me to believe that such a law might be a good idea, at least for gubernatorial elections, in which the winning candidate will actually have to govern the state for four years (or two, in NH and VT). Of course, one could still have a two-party race in which a candidate wins by 8 votes, or a runoff in which a candidate wins by 8 votes. But such a law would produce a second election in most situations like the Washington one, in which, in effect, there was no winner. If Gregoire were smart, she would propose another election in Washington now--an idea that has been suggested by several prominent figures, including the state's former secretary of state. Her proposing the idea while she was ahead would almost certainly be perceived as a magmanimous gesture, and my guess is that she'd win such a re-run fairly easily. It would certainly make governing much easier for her over the next four years.

comments powered by Disqus

More Comments:

Jonathan Dresner - 12/23/2004

Actually, the whole mess, while unpleasant to observe, is a useful cautionary event. With luck, we've learned enough over the last three election cycles about what can go wrong (and also that we've let things slip terribly) that we might be inspired to actually fix and resolve some of these flaky and distorted procedures.

Julie A Hofmann - 12/23/2004

What's been the most fun about this is that the Rossi people have fought tooth and nail to have King County ballots discounted and consistently cried foul against the Dems, despite taking advantage of similar (although not nearly as numerous) finds in pro-Rossi counties. That said, neither of these candidates will do anything of note.

Jeff Vanke - 12/22/2004

Besides the merits that KC discusses, there is the downside of often dramatically reduced turnout for a run-off election. A state legislature candidate in N.C. easily won a plurality of 40+% in a primary race more than a decade ago, but then lost in the run-off; I don't know more about that to report, except that the outcome was weird and correlated to the very low turnout. I'd rather see the built-in run-off of ranking candidates on election day.

Richard Henry Morgan - 12/22/2004

She could favor a run-off law for future elections. or they could go to the incredibly complex Australian system.

In any case, there is one great lacuna in both the Florida Supreme Court's decision, and the decisions of the Washington state courts. Both waxed lyrical about the right to have one's vote counted as a corollary of the right to vote. Neither set of courts seem to think that rights are implicated when the balancing purpose of the election statutes are ignored -- the right to have only legal votes count. In fact one could fairly say the courts have tended toward voting right fundamentalism, since not Florida, not Washington, and not New Jersey made serious attempts to interpret statutory schemes.

Amardeep Singh - 12/22/2004

If it were me, I would just take the 8 votes and start governing. Bush did it in 2000, and it worked better for him than if he'd come in bowing obeisance to the Dems.

I'm not sure I favor a run-off law either. A better approach might be electronic voting with redundant data storage, and of course a paper trail. Get it right the first time.