One of the more curious rhetorical choices coming out of today’s press conference from Dino Rossi’s Charlotte Bellevue headquarters, was former-Senator Slade Gorton’s odd attempt to point to North Carolina as a role model for setting aside an election whenever the margin of error exceeds the margin of victory.
In a hotly contested Agricultural Commissioner race that saw the Democratic incumbent defeated by only 2,287 votes out of 3.3 million cast, the North Carolina courts ordered a new election after it was revealed that Carteret County had accidentally erased 4,438 votes from electronic voting machines. (Oops.) The decision came despite that fact that Carteret split 60-40 for the Republican, suggesting that these missing votes would have only added to the margin of the winner. Gorton uses the North Carolina example to support his argument that if the GOP can prove there are more illegal or improperly canvassed ballots than Christine Gregoire’s 129 vote margin, her election should be tossed out too.
Problem with that argument is… we don’t live in North Carolina.
At the risk of boring you with more wonkish legal stuff, take a look at the pertinent section of the North Carolina election statute: