When they’re not lying…
Fun with recounts in 2004 and 2008
J.E. Dyer, The Lid Blog
One of the most notorious cases he worked was the gubernatorial race in Washington in 2004, which featured an exceptionally close tally between Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Christine Gregoire.
In Washington, as in Florida, there’s one county that seems to come up again and again with Sudden Ballot Syndrome, ballot tampering, and outright voting manipulation. In Washington, it’s King County, which includes Seattle and the Seattle metro area. In December 2004, Richard Baehr at American Thinker described the progress of the heavily-criticized recount in the Washington governor’s race, including the primary role played by King County. An extended excerpt is advisable here, to get the full effect and illuminate how similar it is to what we’re seeing already in Florida:
The Republican candidate for Governor, Dino Rossi, held a lead of a few thousand votes near the end of the counting of the state’s almost two million absentee ballots (70% of Washington’s votes are cast this way). Then, in heavily Democratic King County, officials ‘discovered’ 10,000 additional absentee ballots they had not originally included in the number remaining to be counted. In addition, a Judge ordered the County to allow Democratic Party officials to obtain the names and addresses of 929 people whose ballots were classified as provisional because of mismatched or missing signatures, so as to facilitate the inclusion of these votes. This resulted in a rather unorthodox invasion of privacy: Democratic officials contacted these 929 individuals to ask whom they had voted for in the Governor’s race. If they answered Gregoire, they were then shuttled to the county office to clear up their signature problem. This vote-mining technique added a net 400 votes for Gregoire. The 10,000 extra King County ballots added another 2,000 net votes for Gregoire. As a result of this final Gregoire surge from King County, Rossi’s lead was cut to a scant 261 votes, of about 2.9 million cast.
Then the state began a required mandatory machine recount statewide. But King County officials decided to also hand recount 700 previously ‘uncounted’ ballots for Governor. These ballots were uncounted only in the sense that they had been put through the machine, and the machine had not detected any vote for Governor on them. … Rossi’s lead slipped to just 42 votes. …
The state Democratic Party then paid for a statewide hand recount of the ballots that had already been machine counted twice. The machinations of this hand recount are described every day in the brilliant group blog SoundPolitics.com. As Rossi’s statewide lead crept up to over a 120 votes as eastern Washington and more rural counties recounted their votes, desperate Democratic officials in King County reached back into their bag for one more cache of votes. This time they discovered 573 uncounted absentee votes with missing or inconsistent signatures. They found another 22 hidden near some box in an office.
For those who may not remember, Dino Rossi eventually conceded, rather than continuing to fight what to any reasonable observer was apparently a desperately rigged vote-manipulation effort by the Washington Democrats and the “King County machine.”
Marc Elias’s “breakout” project came four years later when he took the lead role representing Democrat Al Franken in the 2008 Minnesota race against Republican Norm Coleman for U.S. Senate. The Wall Street Journal weighed in on the early going in what became an infamously questionable election and the longest-running recount in U.S. history, dragging on until June 2009.
When Minnesotans woke up last Wednesday, Republican Senator Norm Coleman led Mr. Franken by 725 votes. By that evening, he was ahead by only 477. As of yesterday, Mr. Coleman’s margin stood at 206. This lopsided bleeding of Republican votes is passing strange considering that the official recount hasn’t even begun.
The vanishing Coleman vote came during a week in which election officials are obliged to double-check their initial results. Minnesota is required to do these audits, and it isn’t unusual for officials to report that they transposed a number here or there. In a normal audit, these mistakes could be expected to cut both ways. Instead, nearly every “fix” has gone for Mr. Franken, in some cases under strange circumstances.
For example, there was Friday night’s announcement by Minneapolis’s director of elections that she’d forgotten to count 32 absentee ballots in her car. The Coleman campaign scrambled to get a county judge to halt the counting of these absentees, since it was impossible to prove their integrity 72 hours after the polls closed. The judge refused on grounds that she lacked jurisdiction. [Note: the election director in question later deniedthat she had made such an announcement, although Minnesota officials acknowledged that ballots were toted around in people’s personal vehicles during the vote processing. – J.E.]
Up in Two Harbors, another liberal outpost, Mr. Franken picked up an additional 246 votes. In Partridge Township, he racked up another 100. Election officials in both places claim they initially miscommunicated the numbers. Odd, because in the Two Harbors precinct, none of the other contests recorded any changes in their vote totals.
According to conservative statistician John Lott, Mr. Franken’s gains so far are 2.5 times the corrections made for Barack Obama in the state, and nearly three times the gains for Democrats across Minnesota Congressional races. Mr. Lott notes that Mr. Franken’s “new” votes equal more than all the changes for all the precincts in the entire state for the Presidential, Congressional and statehouse races combined (482 votes).
Eventually, the Minnesota Supreme Court decided to award the election to Franken, who prevailed by a total of 312 votes. A watchdog group challenging ineligible votes was able to establish, however, that more than 312 votes were cast in 2008 by convicted felons, who were voting illegally under the law at the time. (The tally was at least 393, and as discussed by Byron York in 2012 may have been more than 1,000.)
Funny patterns, and Elias, are back in 2018
In Broward County on Thursday, Brenda Snipes failed to answer simple questions from local media about the status of the vote count, and when pressed, said she would “go find out.” She then walked away and never came back.
Reportedly, 100 provisional ballots in Miami-Dade County were rejected since Tuesday because the voters in question had attempted to vote more than once.
Until Republicans call BS on the tactics of the lying, cheating Democrats, Republicans will continue to lose to the lying, cheating Democrats. – The Liberator