Washington State Governor’s Race Still Undecided

The 2004 general election in the US has been over for three weeks plus, but there is still no official winner in the race for Washington state’s executive mansion. Republican Dino Rossi won the original vote count by 261 votes out of around 2.8 million cast. Under state law, this triggered an automatic recount that he won by less, only 42 ballots. The GOP is demanding that the Democratic candidate, Christine Gregoire, concede defeat. The Democrats want to count the ballots again, by hand rather than machine this time. One wonders why the GOP is in such a rush.

Whoever the winner is will not take office until January. Like all American elections, the timing was set many years ago before instantaneous communications and jet air travel. Given the large expanse of territory most states cover, especially in the west, weeks were needed to get a count, inform the winner and get him to the capitol for his term to begin. Often, the winner didn’t know until into December that he had a new job.

Yet the American national trait of impatience seems to have run amok here. Out of 2.8 million ballots cast, 261 or 42 is a dead heat. Any computer expert can vouch for the fact that machines that read ballots cannot be accurate to 261 or 42 out of 2.8 million times. The very fact that different margins of victory turned up at the end of each count is proof that the system is imperfect. Banks and stock brokerages, which operate vast counting systems in the course of daily business, have mistaken results all the time. They remain in business not by perfection but by rectification of their errors. Expecting perfection from an electoral system used ever year or two is ridiculous, but rectification is possible.

At the end of the pre-Thanksgiving recount, the Democrats had vowed to recount by hand, something that will cost their party several hundred thousand dollars to pursue. The GOP, having come out barely ahead, wants to quit counting and declare victory. One can see their point, but if the Democrats are prepared to pay for a recount, fairness suggests that they are entitled to just that. The margin is too narrow to discount the possibility that somewhere 300 votes are missing.

There must certainly be an end to this, and a statewide, hand recount must provide it. The Republicans must accept this for their own good. While the president rails against a fraudulent election in Ukraine and tries to get one run in Iraq, it looks very bad for his party to stop counting votes in a state named after George Washington.


© Copyright 2004 by The Kensington Review, J. Myhre, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent.


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