Washington State Politics - When Does Every Vote Count?

Washington State politics for the past six to eight months has been rather exciting.

The new governor, Christine Gregoire (D), won the election on a margin of two hundred votes - total.

Since then, a number of newspaper and private citizen investigations have called into question the legitimacy of that margin. At least a thousand votes for Gregoire have been found to have been illegally cast (cast by convicted felons, the dead, or there are cast ballots whose voters cannot be found.) One heavily Democratic district in Seattle cast 150 more votes than it had registered voters.

As a result, the Republican candidate Dino Rossi has filed suit in state court, asking the state court to force the state to hold a new election. The trial began today. You can follow the trial news over at Sound Politics.

The interesting question this issue begs is, when do you quit fighting? Obviously partisan politics plays some role here; both major Seattle papers have issued editiorials telling Rossi to back off and dismissing the whole thing as partisan politics. However, Gov. Gregoire has been the beneficiary of election fraud, as the best-known vote problems occurred in Democratic areas. In state where the Governor is a Democrat and the state legistaure is heavily Democratic, where will the impetus come from to solve these very real problems?

I think Rossi is right in asking for a new election rather than trying to prove he actually won, and hopefully this will get the press to hold the legislature's feet to the fire and fix the election system. But I'm not too optimistic anything will change. I expect Rossi's challenge to lose, mainly due to a desire to avoid upending an already extant six-month old administration, and with its dismissal will end any desire to fix the fraud problems that have manifested themselves.