Democrats' lawsuit unanimously rejected by the state Supreme Court

By David Postman
Seattle Times chief political reporter   14 December 2004
 
OLYMPIA ? The state Supreme Court this morning unanimously rejected the Democratic Party's recount lawsuit and will not order election officials to reconsider thousands of previously rejected ballots.

The court, echoing the position of Secretary of State Sam Reed and Republican lawyers, said Washington state law makes clear that a recount should "retabulate" votes already counted and that county canvassing boards cannot be ordered to look again at ballots thrown out during the first two tallies.

The eight of nine justices who attended yesterday's emergency session to hear oral arguments on the case also said there was no call for the court to mandate a statewide standard for signature checking of absentee and provisional ballots.

That had been a key argument of the state Democratic Party who filed the suit against state and local election officials. Party attorneys argued that King County's high rate of rejection for those ballots as compared to other counties meant an uneven standard had been applied.

The court said there was no evidence that the standard applied by King County was the cause of the high rate of rejection.

"We do not take petitioners' argument to suggest that a claimed disparity in rejection rates of voter signatures triggers some independent right, constitutional or otherwise, to a recanvassing of rejected ballots under a newly developed standard, nor does such an argument come to mind," the court wrote in its decision.

Sam Reed, who had predicted the court would not intervene, said he was very pleased with the decision.

"This means we're going to be able to get this hand count completed in a timely manner," Reed said.

Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance was relieved by some good news for his candidate.

"Finally we get some great news," Vance said. "The Supreme Court did the right thing. Clearly the law was on our side."

Democrats filed suit in the Supreme Court on Dec. 3, the same day they sought a statewide, manual recount of the nearly 3 million votes cast in the governor's race. 
   
Republican Dino Rossi won the initial election count by 261 votes over Christine Gregoire. A machine recount narrowed Rossi's victory margin to 42 votes.

The Democrats alleged that election officials chose "expediency over accuracy and equality" in counting votes in the closest governor's race in history.

The party was looking for two main things from their suit: An order requiring every county canvassing board to reconsider thousands of ballots rejected in the first two counts, and an order prohibiting King County from putting Democratic and Republican partisans on the county payroll as ballot counters. Democrats say it makes it too hard for those people to do their job as party observers if they are also given primary responsibility for counting ballots.

The court today rejected that argument, too, saying it was not convinced that meaningful standards for observers are presently lacking.