Josh's Weblog: Timothy Goddard on What Matters in the Washington Revote Debate

Timothy Goddard on What Matters in the Washington Revote Debate

Timothy Goddard examined the law and the issues over at The Flag of the World and came up with a list of what issues matter in the Revote debate:

Broadly speaking, the only thing that matters is the Washington State Supreme Court decision that will be made after the Chelan court decision is appealed. Within that, though, there are a lot of things that matter, based on Washington law, and a lot of things that don’t–and it can be easy to confuse the two.

He then examines the law and divides the issues into the important ones and the side issues.

What's on the “hot” list?

50,000 ballots enhanced illegally (it must be possible to revisit original intent)
1,800 voterless ballots (far more of these than the margin of victory)
348 unverified provisional ballots mixed in (also much greater than the margin of victory)
Felons voting (at 89 so far, very close to the margin of victory)

What's on the “not-so-hot” list?

Dead voters (not enough of them)
Systemic problems (we have to use the system we have)
Gregoire’s inauguration (it doesn't change anything)
Polls and petitions (these don't affect trials)
Voterless voting is not atypical (but when voterless voting exceeds the margin of victory it is important)
Double voters
Invalidating all close elections (margins like these don't happen very often)
Intention to defraud (election law doesn't care about intent, only results)
Ohio (margin there was thousands of times greater)

There is one issue remaining that have not been allocated to the hot list, or the not list: military voters. King County may have messed up their absentee ballots but it's unclear if they broke the law and invalidated the election.

Mr. Goddard has another post that has a marvelous coincidence:

Care to see something kind of spooky and completely irrelevant? If you take the total difference between Rossi’s initial margin of 261, and Gregoire’s current margin of 129, you get 390. If you subtract from that Rossi’s second margin of 42 votes, you get 348–which is the exact number of provisional ballots mixed in with regular ballots. Ooooh–spooky.

It's quite unlikely that the numbers are related, but it is a cute observation.

Update: Tim Harris of BIAW has identified an additional 76 felons who voted.

Josh Poulson

Posted Thursday, Jan 13 2005 10:13 AM