They’re willing to pay for it, so Christine Gregoire and state Democrats are within their rights to ask for a manual recount of the closest gubernatorial election in the nation’s history.
That’s not all they want, however.
“They want to go back and start over again,” Secretary of State Sam Reed, the state’s top elections official, said Tuesday.
Gregoire and the party are way out of bounds in asking that the rules be changed in an effort to add more ballots to the recount. In a petition to the state Supreme Court, the party seeks to force counties to reconsider ballots that officials disqualified before the first count. Apparently, the Democrats believe that the only way they can change the result – which made Republican Dino Rossi the governor-elect by 42 votes out of nearly 2.9 million cast – is to change the rules.
It is disappointing to see Gregoire, who served the state with such integrity for 12 years as its attorney general, resorting to desperate tactics that could undermine the public’s faith in the electoral process for years to come. Good-faith decisions by county election officials regarding the validity of ballots are made before anyone knows how close an election will be. Having such subjective decisions made with the knowledge that a race is extremely close could open the door to temptation and corruption.
Some ballots are rejected in any election. Perhaps they were postmarked after the election date. Perhaps they weren’t signed. Without evidence of fraud or a willful effort to exclude valid votes, which no one is suggesting here, the rulings of local election officials ought to be final.
If decisions over individual ballots are to be made by the courts, where will it end?
“It establishes a bit of a precedent that if you don’t like the results, just go to court and see if you can get a friendly judge to intervene,” Reed said. “Historically, we’ve relied on the process itself to work.”
It worked in the 2000 U.S. Senate election, when a recount confirmed Democrat Maria Cantwell’s victory over GOP incumbent Slade Gorton. It has worked in a number of extremely close levy and school-bond elections. It can work now, too.
Recount the votes that were declared valid in the first place, but don’t change the rules after the fact. Otherwise, what’s the point of having rules?
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