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The contest is over the contest.

The GOP attorney tried to argue out of both sides of his mouth. He essentially admits that the “safety valve” (RCW 29A.60.210) applies to the recount, but not to these 723 ballots, because they have been previously “rejected.” He also argues that the proper place for the Democrats to address these ballots is in a contest, but apparently it would do irreparable harm to Dino Rossi, if he had to challenge them in a contest.

Essentially, there is going to be a contest, and the GOP would rather it be filed by the Democrats, so they can accuse them of dragging this through the courts. At the very least, they would prefer that the burden be on the Democrats to prove in a contest that these ballots should be counted. Oh… and apparently it is all Larry Phillips fault.

As I figured, the GOP case all comes down to whether these ballots were “rejected,” and the King County attorney clearly argues that there was “no affirmative rejection”, but rather, that the ballots were “misfiled.” That said, she also argues that the canvassing board has the right to re-examine rejected ballots, at its discretion.

However, the most important new piece of information learned in the hearing this morning is that King County has located 583 signatures out of the 723 ballots in question. It seems likely that these ballots would add about 120 votes to Christine Gregoire’s margin… if counted.

Oral arguments before the Washington State Supreme court over whether King County should tally the 723 previously uncounted (and unrejected) ballots, will be broadcast live at 9:30AM on TVW. I’ll be watching via streaming video.

Now that it seems clear that Christine Gregoire has won the hand recount, the court can rule dispassionately, without having to worry about reversing an election. But the ruling is important nonetheless, for if the 723 ballots aren’t counted, and the margin stands at only 8, Dino Rossi will surely lead us into the abyss of a contested election. Whereas, add 120 votes to Gregoire’s lead, and Rossi will be forced to think twice.

This is from a “reliable source”, but “unconfirmed” and “unofficial” and all the other tentative qualifiers you can think of, but — not counting the 723 — Democratic number crunchers believe that after King County’s results are added in, Christine Gregoire will lead the manual recount… by less than 10 votes.

Expect the mainstream media to start reporting this tonight.

UPDATE:
I only scooped the AP by a few minutes. It’s in the P-I:

Democratic State Party Chairman Paul Berendt says recount results from King County give Democrat Christine Gregoire an eight-vote statewide victory over Republican Dino Rossi in the governor’s race.

King County Elections has confirmed that both parties received recount data today.

I wonder if Rossi still wants to stop counting votes now that he’s behind?

Thank you Jim “Hill” King for pointing out that the documents filed in tomorrow’s Supreme Court hearing are now available for download from the Secretary of State’s website. And of course, a special thanks to the people at SOS for doing the work to make these documents public.

Let’s have an informed debate.

Apparently there was some sort of hearing yesterday in Judge Arend’s court regarding a bond related to the TRO. I have made available for download a copy of an amended declaration that was filed as part of the hearing, in which Democrats detail the changes in Rossi-won counties that showed an increase in the number of “ballots cast” from the initial count to the machine recount that benefited Dino Rossi:

Adams		7	Rossi +15
Benton		3	Rossi +1
Clallam		1	No change
Clark		9	Rossi +4
Grant		52	Rossi +18
Island		4	Rossi +5
Kittitas	34	Rossi +7
Lewis		3	Rossi +2
Mason		3	Rossi +1
Pierce		9	Rossi +19
Skagit		147	Rossi +18
Spokane		7	Rossi +13
Snohomish	223	Rossi +11

It should be noted that neither party ever asked the courts to disallow these ballots, and in fact it would likely not be possible to outsort most of them after the fact. And some of these new ballots represent significant additions as a percentage of the total county vote; Republicans have offered no explanation for Grant and Kittitas, where the change is so large as to suggest that ballots went unprocessed during the initial certification.

I’m loathe to call a politician a hypocrite, because voters almost seem to demand it from their representatives. But for Dino Rossi to say that these ballots should count and that these errors should be excused, while arguing that King County’s negligence demands that the 723 should be disallowed, is hypocritical even for a politician.

As I’ve said before, errors like these occur in every election, but usually the vote isn’t so close that they make a difference. We need to fix those mistakes we can find — as is the long-established practice — count the votes, and move on.

One of the stupider arguments the Rossifarians have made against Democrats thus far is that they are somehow trying to “change the rules” regarding the 723 absentee ballots that King County mistakenly left uncounted thus far. Oh please.

In any other year, in any other election, in any other county… these ballots, once the error was discovered, would be counted. In fact, The Seattle P-I reports that five other counties — Whatcom, Kittitas, Chelan, Snohomish and Pierce — have already found and added valid ballots that weren’t included in the original count. [“Other counties added votes in recount“]

Indeed, if the Supreme Court grants the GOP their request for an injunction, it is Dino Rossi who will have changed the established rules.

“If they uphold the (lower court) decision, it raises questions not just about what we’ve done, but about what historically all counties have done for as long as I’ve been in the business, which is 25 years,” said Snohomish County Auditor Bob Terwilliger.

That’s not just one auditor’s opinion. The Manual Recount Procedures – FAQ issued by Republican Secretary of State Sam Reed on December 6, states that “As a general matter, counties will not revisit prior canvassing decisions in the manual recount.” But…

…Any canvassing board at any time in the original count, machine recount, or manual recount may, upon finding that a discrepancy or inconsistency exists, direct a recanvass of any necessary portion of the ballots.

That’s not much more than a restatement of RCW 29A.60.210, but it is an interpretation of the statute that has long guided elections in Washington state.

The other day, in trying to explain the process by which the 723 ballots were left not rejected, but uncounted, I wrote that I hoped “a King County election worker will correct me if I’m wrong.” Well, within 24 hours a memo was released from Superintendent of Elections Bill Huennekens showing that I was indeed wrong on some of the specifics, but right in my general conclusion: these ballots were not marked “rejected” but rather “No Signature on File.”

But more interesting to me was the following tidbit from the memo that has been conveniently ignored by unsound muckrakers:

This spring, I learned that the long-standing operating procedure for absentee voters who did not have a signature in the system was to simply let the ballot count. For the May special election, I instructed staff that this was not acceptable and that the effort must be made to locate the voter’s original registration card, or the image of their signature.

King County Elections has been roundly criticized as sloppy and incompetent — even corrupt — over these 723 signatures, but the only reason we learned about them in the first place was because of efforts to tighten up lax signature matching procedures. Funny thing is, if this election had taken place under the “long-standing operating procedures” of prior years, Gregoire may already have been certified the winner.

Before I cast my vote for a judge, I usually look at the bar association qualification ratings. After all, how am I, a layman, supposed to make an informed decision on a “nonpartisan” race for which the candidates aren’t even allowed to campaign on the issues?

So I was curious to see the Tacoma-Pierce County Bar Association’s Judicial Qualifications Committee’s most recent ratings for Stephanie Arend, the judge who granted Dino Rossi an injunction to stop counting legal votes in King County:

Lloyd L. Alton, Jr.		Well qualified
Stephanie A. Arend*		Minimally qualified 
Scott A. Candoo   		Well qualified
Clayton R. Dickinson		Qualified
Henry Haas      		Exceptionally well qualified
Christine J. Quinn-Brintnall	Qualified
Douglas W. VanScoy		Well qualified
Karl L. Williams		Well qualified|
Edward S. Winskill		Exceptionally well qualified

That’s right… Judge Arend was only rated “minimally qualified”, the second to lowest rating available. Out of the nine candidates running in 1999, she was deemed to be the least qualified!

A candidate will receive a Minimally Qualified Rating when the candidate meets the minimum statutory requirements for the judicial position sought, is in good standing with the Washington State Bar and other Bar Associations to which the candidate has been admitted and possesses the basic legal ability required for the judicial position but is deficient in one or more of the criteria for a Qualified Rating.

I could not find a more recent judicial rating, probably because she’s run unopposed since then. I assume she’s benefited from some on-the-job training, but I just thought you might like to know what kind of “minimally qualified” legal decision this election might turn on.

Liberal political website Permanent Defense reminds us of Dino Rossi’s quote from December 4th: “I have faith in you, the voters of Washington. Unfortunately, Christine Gregoire has faith in lawyers.”

It is curious to see how Dino’s faith in voters has wavered in the face of adversity. But then, after watching him run to the center after a establishing a right-wing legislative voting record, his sudden conversion to The Church of Christ, Attorney should come as no surprise.

Rossi now knows that he will likely lose the hand recount, regardless of the Supreme Court decision, and is now laying the legal and PR groundwork for a contested election and an eventual revote. This is a strategy that has been planned for weeks. Indeed, when you load the elections page at Permanent Defense, it plays an audio clip from a Nov 24th KOMO TV report, in which state Republicans threaten that if there is a recount, the Bush White House will send a team of lawyers to put up a fight: “And they will be unleashed, and there will be lawsuits affecting virtually every county in the state.”

It almost sounds as scriptural in it’s phrasing, as it is prophetic in describing our current circumstances. I guess Rossi has always been a man of faith… in lawyers.

There’s a hell of a lot to blog about, but it’s been a long day, it’s late, and I’m tired. So I’m just going to briefly mention a man I met at the rally today.

We’ve heard a lot about the 723 ballots that haven’t been counted because signatures were not scanned into the King County Elections computers. But what seems to have been forgotten is that these ballots were cast by real people… people like Jack Oxford, one of the 723 citizens who cast their ballots believing that every vote counts, only to find that theirs did not.

You may have seen Jack on the news, asking Dino Rossi not to take away his right to vote. Jack’s not a politician or an activist or a blogger, he’s just an ordinary taxpayer forced into the extraordinary situation of publicly pleading for his vote to count. He is also a veteran, who risked his life defending the basic democratic rights that Dino Rossi is now going to court to deny him.

If all we’re talking about is absentee ballots, and signature cards, and chain-of-custody, and canvassing and recanvassing and abstract stuff like that, it becomes easy to talk with authority about disenfranchising a disembodied voter because of a clerical error or a technicality. But unless we remember that each one of these ballots represents a real person expressing their most fundamental democratic right, we don’t know jack.

As my regular readers know, I have strong opinions, and express them passionately. Thus I take considerable care to get my facts straight before presenting them as such, for fear of later being made to look the fool.

So it is with some embarrassment that I must now admit that I have previously misspoken by referring to the 723 ballots as “erroneously rejected.” In fact, after considerable research and analysis, I have come to the conclusion that they were not actually rejected at all.

While I hope a King County election worker will correct me if I’m wrong, here is apparently what happened. During the original canvassing, those absentee ballots for which there was no signature on file in the computer, were set aside for later verification. They were not “rejected”, and they were not mixed in with the rejected ballots. They were sorted and segregated into separate trays, but due to some unexplained error, were locked into the cage with the rejected ballots, and forgotten.

This is borne out by the TV video of the 150 ballots being found, in the cage, in their own separate tray. And it also explains why none of these 723 voters received notice that their ballot had been rejected due to signature problems… because they were never rejected.

Thus King County Elections is not seeking to recanvass these ballots, but merely to complete the canvassing that was started during the first count, but never completed.

This is a subtle, but important distinction. To say that these ballots are being recanvassed, implies that the canvassing board is seeking to add more ballots to the count by overruling prior decisions — right or wrong — of delegated election workers. In fact, no decision as to the validity of the signatures on these ballots was ever made, erroneous or otherwise.

Unlike the 1500 absentee ballots that were rejected by election workers due to signature matching problems, the signatures on the “723” were never examined… for there was nothing to compare them to. And unlike the infamous 22 ballots recently discovered in the bases of polling equipment, these are not newly found ballots.

The “723” are ballots that were included in the canvass of the first count, but were not counted because their canvassing was never properly completed. They were not “rejected.” They are not “new.” Those that are determined to be valid were simply “miscounted.”

This is exactly the kind of error a recount is intended to catch.

Great minds think alike…

Rally at Rossi’s:
Where: Rossi HQ, 330 112th AVE NE (corner of 112th NE & 4th, in Bellevue)
When: Tomorrow, Sunday Dec 19, 3PM
Why: Do you really need to ask? The bastard’s trying to steal this election by stopping KC from counting votes!

Come join me and other concerned voters from around the state, and tell Dino Rossi that we don’t want him turning Washington into Florida. Express your outrage, mug for the TV cameras, and then maybe we’ll all go out for a beer.

According to Chris Vance’s backup singers over on (un)Sound Politics, KVI is planning a “Ukraine-themed rally” in Olympia on Tuesday. I suppose that means poisoning the water supply with dioxin. (Which I believe is actually one of the BIAW’s top legislative priorities for the 2005 session.)

Wait a minute… Republicans are trying to stop King County from counting legal votes, and they get to protest? Are we living in a friggin’ Orwell novel?

Well why let the righties have all the fun? I say we organize a protest rally of our own, this Sunday, some place symbolically (and conveniently) located in or near Seattle. I’ll bring the beer and the TV news crews.

So if you’re up for a little fun at Dino Rossi’s expense (or just want to get your ugly mug on TV), let’s start brainstorming and spreading the word. I promise you… this’ll be fun.

Spokane County just reported: Gregoire +8, Rossi +15, meaning Rossi has gained 8 votes on the hand recount thus far, bringing his margin up to a whopping 50 votes.

The Snark may not like my math, but if you take the ratio of new votes to vote totals statewide thus far, and extrapolate that to the vote totals in King County after the machine recount, we would expect to see Gregoire +327 to Rossi +196 in the hand count… without the 723 perfectly-legal-but-inexplicably-excluded ballots.

So there.

That’s all from me for a few hours.

Pierce County Superior Court has issued a temporary restraining order preventing King County from counting the 573 (723?) erroneously rejected absentee ballots. Back to the Supremes.

I will restrain from editorializing for the moment… I don’t want to sound like the paranoid loons on the right-wing blogs.

UPDATE:
I take that back… I’m only willing to show so much restraint.

First of all, I’m fairly confident that the Supreme Court will overturn this decision. But if they don’t, and Rossi wins on a technicality, then we will have seen a miscarriage of justice that transcends any paranoid fantasy perpetrated on the right-wing blogs.

Nobody is arguing that these are not legal votes from legal voters. Nobody is implying that there was any voter error. These are ballots that would have been counted the first time if election workers had done their job right.

What the court just said was “fuck you” to the voters being disenfranchised, and “fuck you” to efforts to elect a governor based on who actually got the most votes, rather than who got the most votes in counties that managed to canvass them correctly the first time around.

Gregoire could still pull ahead without these ballots, but regardless of who “wins” this election, voters should be outraged if these votes aren’t counted. I know I will be.

UPDATE, UPDATE:
Oh… and to those of you offended by my use of profanity… it’s my blog and I can curse if I want to. What… you never express emotion when things don’t go your way?

Pierce County has just reported their hand recount results: Gregoire +232, Rossi +201

With only Spokane and King left to report, we are virtually back to where we started, with a net pickup of one vote for Dino Lossi Rossi.