WA State Governors Election
The close election for Governor is getting a very wide circle of interest.
Professor Stephen Bainbridge (a corporate law professor at UCLA),
has some observations and links to an interesting article by John Fund at the
Wall Street Opinion Journal
Prof. Bainbridge:
I've gotten a couple of emails from Washington state residents, who think my assumption of partisan shenanigans is misplaced. They argue it is a combination of a really close election and election law problems. Maybe so, but I spent a lot of years in Illinois, where both parties had an amazing ability to "find" votes as needed.
So I'm predisposed to agree with John Fund's take on things:
Amid all the wrangling over this election, almost all semblance of a fair system has been lost. It now looks like Washington's election will be decided by lawyers and a court, rather than by the voters. The result probably hinges on whether 723 King County absentee ballots that were rejected during the first two vote counts will be counted after all. A local judge has ruled that it is too late to inject the 723 ballots into the recount and that if they were valid votes they should have been counted in the first or second recounts. Democrats respond that the fault lies with King County clerks, who failed to take extra steps to verify the ballots, and not with the voters.
The state Supreme Court will in all likelihood settle the argument and thus determine who the winner is this coming week. Regardless of the outcome, there's now a growing number of people who believe the counting process in King County has been compromised.
Go read the whole thing. Fund details a slew of problems with the vote in Democrat controlled King County. All of which somehow managed to favor the Democratic candidate. Hmm...
So true -this is a close one and the only county that seems to be doing the dirty (or incompetent) politics seems to be largely Democratic King County. If the Dems get in office, will there be a sweeping reform? Not bloody likely.
Posted by DaveH at December 20, 2004 5:32 PM