GOP says 300 voted illegally

By NEIL MODIE
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER   27 January 2005

Republicans have confirmed that 240 convicted felons and 60 other people voted illegally in the election that Democrat Christine Gregoire won by 129 votes, state GOP Chairman Chris Vance said yesterday.

Announcing his party's latest tally of unlawful votes in the governor's race ammunition in the Republican lawsuit to overturn the election result Vance said the 300 are in addition to 437 provisional ballots that were erroneously tabulated in King, Pierce and Stevens counties without being validated.

"The bottom line is 737 and counting," Vance said, adding that the Republicans continue to deploy about 10 people hunting for more illegal votes. He called the effort "a work in progress. ... I expect this number to grow every day."

GOP leaders and supporters of Dino Rossi, Gregoire's Republican opponent, have maintained a drumbeat of accusations aimed at keeping alive public uncertainty about the validity of Gregoire's squeaker election after 2.9 million votes were cast.

The Republicans also filed briefs yesterday in Chelan County Superior Court responding to Democratic Party motions asking that the GOP lawsuit be dismissed on jurisdictional and other grounds.

State Democratic Party spokeswoman Kirstin Brost replied last night that the Republicans' latest accusations about unlawful votes "include plenty of exaggerations but no grounds to throw out election results. ... Much of it is irrelevant to the court case."

She cited as an example of GOP exaggerations the charge that 437 provisional ballots were "illegal," and noted that "all indications are that most provisional ballots inadvertently put in the wrong slot on Election Day were cast by properly registered voters."

In King County, election officials have acknowledged that 348 provisional ballots were inadvertently counted without being verified. But they said the validation rate was 87 percent among the thousands of provisional ballots that were checked before being tabulated.

Vance said the 300 illegal votes include those of 186 felons in King County and 54 in other counties whose right to vote had not been restored; 44 cast in the names of dead voters; 10 by people who voted more than once in the Washington election; and six by people who voted both in Washington and in another state Nov. 2.

  
  
Although Vance couldn't provide a list of who those voters were or the circumstances under which they voted, he said the party has confirmed that all of those votes were illegal and that the names eventually will be submitted to the court.

The Republicans contend in the lawsuit that the court should order a revote because it is impossible to determine who truly won the election. Rossi won the initial count and a machine recount before Gregoire won a subsequent hand recount.

Chelan County Judge John Bridges will hear arguments on the Democrats' motions for dismissal Feb. 4 in Wenatchee. The Republicans also have sued all 39 counties, alleging election improprieties in some of them. King and a number of other counties have asked that the suits against them be dismissed.

These are the Democrats' arguments for dismissal of the suit and the Republicans' responses:

The Democrats say the Washington Constitution gives only the Legislature, not the courts, the authority to decide contested elections. The Republicans say the Legislature, as allowed by the Constitution, passed a law saying election contests may be heard by the state's courts, and that the state Supreme Court has heard past contests of state elections.

The Democrats say that if any court may decide an election contest, it must be the state Supreme Court, not the Superior Court. The Republicans say the election contest statute allows cases to be brought in Superior Court. Regardless of the outcome in the trial court, however, the case is expected to end up before the state's highest court.

The Democrats say that the law requires that potentially illegal votes must be challenged before they are counted, and that election irregularities aren't grounds for invalidating an election unless it can be proven that they would have changed the outcome. The Republicans say county officials have the responsibility for removing felons and dead voters from the rolls and that the law doesn't require that each illegal vote be identified to a candidate.

The Democrats say the law doesn't empower the courts to order a new election. The Republicans say the law specifically provides for elections to be annulled and that even if the court finds that it can't order a revote, the vacancy in the governor's office would have to be filled in "the next general election" next fall.