In his ruling today Judge John Bridges of Chelan County Superior Court upheld the election of Governor Christine Gregoire saying that Republican lawyers had failed to provide evidence of fraud or that a number of illegal votes had directly benefited Gov. Gregoire. He threw out the GOP’s proportional distribution argument, saying that the method was not statistically sound. Republican’s have said they will appeal to the State Supreme Court.
So there you have it folks, after hand picking the most conservative judge in the state they could find the Washington State GOP still couldn’t win their ridiculous case.
I have been nothing but impressed with Judge Bridges throughout this whole case, he has been proffesional and judicial. He acknowledged that in any election errors will occur but that didn’t constitute fraud. In addition he wisely chose to throw out the GOP’s unsound method for trying to determine felon voters intent (hint: determining the votes of fellons by basing it on the distribution of the popluation at large doesn’t work because, surprise, felon voters aren’t a randomly chosen sample!).
This is a great quote:
“This is the biggest mess I’ve ever seen,” GOP attorney Dale Foreman said in his opening statement. “The system is broken and it must be fixed.”
Apparently Mr. Foreman was hiding in a cave during the Florida butterfly ballot mess of 2000 if this is the biggest election related mess he has ever seen. (I’m sure Joe can point us to examples of even bigger elections messes).
The big mess is that we happened to get an election with a margin of victory well within the margin of error. But when that happens you go with the law, and by law Christine Gregoire is governor. When Democrats whined in 2000 that Al Gore got more votes, the GOP rightly told them to shove it, its the electoral college that matters. Likewise when the GOP whined here that Dino Rossi was ahead in the first counts the Democrats (and now the Judge) told them to shove it, its the final hand count that well counts.
And while this mess will continue on in appeal I think it is safe to say that the State Supreme court is unlikely to see things differently given how closely Judge Bridges adhered to the law.
Ok Dino, time to stand up and be a man, acecept your loss and stop wasting tax-payer money by pursuing this case. Likely to happen? Probably not.
|
Categories: Election 2004
|
June 6th, 2005 at 2:11:09 pm
I haven’t read the decision, but I think you are vastly overstating the issue here. There were some key quotes by the judge in that story that indicate, absent absolute proof of fraudulent votes for Gregoire that exceed the margin of victory, the judge did not feel it was his place to overturn what he admitted was a very flawed election. He wisely deferred to the other two branches to fix those problems (as a good, principled conservative jurist should) and upheld the election. Statistical analyses may prove a very high likelihood that Gregoire only won because of improper voting, but probabilities are not sufficient to overturn an election, neither in Washington 2004 nor in Florida 2000.
June 6th, 2005 at 2:50:05 pm
It’s amazing to me that this continues. Presumably the normal inaugural period has already elapsed; has the former governor simply continued as acting governor?
June 6th, 2005 at 3:05:20 pm
The Democrat, Gregoire, was certified the winner following the recount and was duly inaugurated and has been serving ever since.
I had way too much time on my hands over the past two weeks and actually watched much of the trial on the web. To anyone who watched the trial, today’s decision can hardly be surprising. Frankly, the Republicans put on an embarrassingly poor case despite all of the money they spent.
June 6th, 2005 at 3:12:18 pm
Statistical analyses may prove a very high likelihood that Gregoire only won because of improper voting
That was far from the judge’s findings anyway. First he found the Republican’s statiscal analysis so flawed that in the end he struck all of the experts’ testimony. He also pointed out that even had he accepted that testimony it did not support the conclusion that Gregroire owed her victory to “illegal” votes.
(Incidentally, the only specific illegal votes which he found to have been cast for governor resulted in Rossi losing 4 votes.)
June 6th, 2005 at 5:43:08 pm
Andrew, he said there were flaws, and that King County needs to do a much better job, but he never said the election itself was very flawed. Again, we are talking about an error rate of less than .01 %. If you want very flawed try the list of felon voters which had over 10% (that four orders of magnitude more) errors.
June 6th, 2005 at 7:11:09 pm
I haven’t read the decision, but I think you are vastly overstating the issue here. There were some key quotes by the judge in that story that indicate, absent absolute proof of fraudulent votes for Gregoire that exceed the margin of victory, the judge did not feel it was his place to overturn what he admitted was a very flawed election. He wisely deferred to the other two branches to fix those problems (as a good, principled conservative jurist should) and upheld the election. Statistical analyses may prove a very high <i>likelihood</i> that Gregoire only won because of improper voting, but probabilities are not sufficient to overturn an election, neither in Washington 2004 nor in Florida 2000.
June 6th, 2005 at 7:50:05 pm
It’s amazing to me that this continues. Presumably the normal inaugural period has already elapsed; has the former governor simply continued as acting governor?
June 6th, 2005 at 8:05:20 pm
The Democrat, Gregoire, was certified the winner following the recount and was duly inaugurated and has been serving ever since.
I had way too much time on my hands over the past two weeks and actually watched much of the trial on the web. To anyone who watched the trial, today’s decision can hardly be surprising. Frankly, the Republicans put on an embarrassingly poor case despite all of the money they spent.
June 6th, 2005 at 8:12:18 pm
<i>Statistical analyses may prove a very high likelihood that Gregoire only won because of improper voting</i>
That was far from the judge’s findings anyway. First he found the Republican’s statiscal analysis so flawed that in the end he struck all of the experts’ testimony. He also pointed out that even had he accepted that testimony it did not support the conclusion that Gregroire owed her victory to “illegal” votes.
(Incidentally, the only specific illegal votes which he found to have been cast for governor resulted in Rossi losing 4 votes.)
June 6th, 2005 at 10:43:08 pm
Andrew, he said there were flaws, and that King County needs to do a much better job, but he never said the election itself was very flawed. Again, we are talking about an error rate of less than .01 %. If you want very flawed try the list of felon voters which had over 10% (that four orders of magnitude more) errors.