Washington’s been counting votes so long and in so many ways that we’ve all been forced to learn Recount Math.
The methodology, as you’ve come to know, is predicated on the principle that the number of votes counted each time will never add up the same way, because the integers keep changing.
Between discoveries of ballots, anomalies of tabulation and a voter who reportedly wrote in “Christine Rossi” for governor, we may never know precisely how many votes Dino Rossi and Christine Gregoire each received Nov. 2.
Even Pythagoras of Samos, who figured out the secret of a triangle’s equanimity, could never solve this numeric mystery.
Until this week, I hadn’t worried that much about the credibility of the whole process. Twice, votes were counted, and twice Rossi won. One more and we’re done, right? No hand recount has ever reversed an election outcome.
Moreover, the state’s election lords reassured me that Washington’s “clearly written” recount law vaccinates us from Florida Foul-up, the flulike bug that passed from chad to chad in 2000.
Did the vaccine run out in the Democratic haven of King County?
Hundreds of ballots keep appearing and disappearing with amazing regularity in the Tukwila counting center.
It’s giving Republican Party leaders a brutal case of Tukwila tummyache. Their growing delirium threatens Dino Rossi’s brief tenure as governor-elect. Rossi should be concerned. His friends and their lawyers are suggesting the cure is to hold another election, throwing out his victory before we know if he’s lost.
You don’t get do-overs in this republic. This isn’t Ukraine.
What we will get, eventually, is a governor. Maybe this week, maybe not.
Once that’s done, election officials must set out to regain the trust of voters like Bob Bogash of Snohomish.
On Election Day, he and his wife dropped their absentee ballots in a mailbox in Kitsap County. Her vote got counted. His didn’t. It’s never been seen.
Maybe it got lost in the mail. Maybe it arrived after his wife’s and was stored with 700 other never-counted Snohomish County ballots postmarked Nov. 3 or later.
“I’m very frustrated,” he told me this week. “I bolt up at three in the morning and wonder what if one person wins by one vote. Then I wonder about my vote. I really feel like the credibility of the system is somewhere between that of Ukraine and zero.”
Washington’s body politic is getting a rare physical these days. Our constitution and electoral laws are undergoing a full body scan, with the cavity of every clause getting examined.
It is a checkup, not an autopsy. A few phrases need legal medication, and the vote-counting process needs a good massage.
Cool-headed lawmakers insist that is in the future. For now, they say, a law that’s been good enough for all these years should be good enough for a few more days.
That equation adds up for me.
Reporter Jerry Cornfield’s column on politics runs every Sunday: 360 352-8623 or jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
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