Josh's Weblog: Foulkes v. Hayes and the Washington Revote

Foulkes v. Hayes and the Washington Revote

Timmothy Goddard examines the Washington voting contest precedent of Foulkes v. Hayes.

The fact that in 1975 those extra votes came from fraud, and that today they came directly from the negligence itself is moot. The law clearly draws no distinction between fraud and negligence for the purposes of an election contest, and the Supreme Court decision clearly stated that it was the negligence, not fraud, that led the the revote.

A lot of folks think that the voting problems have to be proven to be deliberate for the contest to succeed. By looking at this precdent it's clear that fraud did not have to be present, just negligence.

The only argument that I can see that Democrats can make against this is that it’s not clear that Gregoire gained any votes from the irregularities—this is notably different than the argument currently being made by Democratic officials, that it’s not clear that the irregularities were enough to alter the election. As we’ve seen, that’s not necessary. To make this new argument, Democrat lawyers will have to argue—with a straight face—that irregularities that added new ballots to the pot in the most overwhelmingly Democratic county in the State (let alone provisional ballots) might not have increased the Democrat’s lead.

When Victoria Taft had Rossi on her show Thursday Night, he seemed optimistic and upbeat, although he was more concerned about the delay tactics in the court case tiring out the public attention. Gregoire has gone for fait accompli by getting inaugurated as quickly as possible, but that has no bearing on contesting the election.

Rossi says that if everything goes well and there's no further delay we're looking at an election in March or April. With delay tactics who knows how long it might take.

Josh Poulson

Posted Saturday, Jan 15 2005 12:52 PM