Washington gubernatorial election, 2004

The 2004 Washington gubernatorial election was the election for governor of the U.S. state of Washington in the year 2004. Three parties, the Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the Libertarian Party, fielded candidates. The primary election was held on September 14, and the general election was held on November 2. It is notable for being among the closest races in United States election history, when the winner, Christine Gregoire, a Democrat, was elected after a second recount turned the election in her favor by a margin of 129 votes, or 0.0045%.

On December 30, Christine Gregoire was declared the victor of a third count, conducted by hand, partially delayed by a court order preventing King County from including over 700 ballots that county officials say were improperly rejected. The election has been plagued with increasingly close margins of victory (it has been the closest race in Washington state history). Although Gregoire was sworn in as Governor of Washington on January 12, 2005, her opponent Dino Rossi did not formally concede and called for a re-vote due to concerns about the integrity of the election. The Republicans filed a lawsuit in Chelan County Superior Court to overturn the election, which was rejected by the trial judge. Rossi choose not to appeal to the Washington State Supreme Court, thereby conceding the election on 6 June 2005.

The primaries

A primary election is one in which a political party selects a candidate for a later election by all registered voters in that jurisdiction (nominating primary). Primaries are sometimes open only to registered members of that party, and sometimes open to all voters. In open primaries, voters must typically choose only one primary to participate in during that election cycle. Washington, however, had used a different system, known as blanket primaries, in which voters were able to vote in all parties' primaries on the same ballot, though not for more than one candidate per office. Washington's blanket primary system was struck down by the United States Supreme Court in 2004 as violating the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of assembly.

Primaries can also be used in non-partisan elections to reduce the set of candidates that go on to the general election (qualifying primary). (Many U.S. city, county and school board elections are nonpartisan.) Generally, twice as many candidate pass the primary as can win in the general election, so a single seat election primary would allow the top two primary candidates to participate in the general election following.

Because many Washingtonians were disappointed over the loss of the blanket primary, which the Washington State Grange helped institute in 1935, the Grange filed Initiative 872 in 2004 to establish a qualifying primary for partisan races, thereby allowing voters to once again cross party lines in the primary election. Supporters claimed it would bring back voter choice; opponents said it would exclude third parties and independents from general election ballots, would result in Democrat or Republican-only races in certain districts, and would in fact reduce voter choice. The initiative was put to a public vote in November 2004 and passed.

Democratic primary

In July 2003, incumbent state governor Gary Locke indicated he would not seek a third term. This opened up the Democratic primary to alternate candidates.

Former Washington Supreme Court justice Phil Talmadge was the first candidate to enter the race for the Democratic primary, challenging Gary Locke before he announced his retirement, but Washington Attorney General Christine Gregoire quickly became the frontrunner, leading in fundraising and endorsements. King County Executive Ron Sims also failed to catch on, perhaps due to his association with the controversial Sound Transit light rail project. According to a March 2004 Mellman Group poll, Gregoire would beat both Sims and Talmadge 36% to 11% and 4% in an open primary, and would beat Sims 55% to 17% in a closed primary. [1] (http://www.thestranger.com/current/city4.html) On April 29, 2004, Talmadge announced he was withdrawing from the race following the discovery of a benign kidney tumor (angiomyolipoma), citing the likely need for surgery and associated recovery time. When the Democratic primary was held, Gregoire beat Sims 66% to 30%.

Republican primary

The state Republican Party struggled to find a candidate through most of 2003 when presumed candidate Bob Herbold, the former Chairman and CEO of Microsoft, declined to run. They finally recruited Dino Rossi, a relatively obscure political figure who left the state Senate to pursue a gubernatorial run due to state elected officials being prohibited from raising money while the legislature is in session.

Libertarian primary

The state Libertarian Party race was between Ruth Bennett, former state chair of the party in Washington and Colorado, and Michael Nelson. The number of total voters in the primary was smaller than the number of votes that Ruth Bennett received for governor as fewer people selected the Libertarian primary ballot than voted Libertarian in the general election.

General election

Initial results

Gregoire led in almost all polls conducted leading up to the election, but Rossi was able to close in on her late in the race and won considerable support from Eastern Washington. He also ran much stronger than expected in Snohomish and Pierce Counties. Gregoire received strong support from the largest county in the state, heavily Democratic King County, where she outpolled Rossi by nearly three to two. During the initial ballot count, the lead changed hands several times.

Absentee ballots

Washington is unusual for a U.S. state in that it only requires that an absentee ballot be postmarked by the day of the election to be valid, while most other states require the ballot to have arrived at the election office by that time. Due to this as well as the state's high number of absentee ballots (more than 60% of all King County voters were absentee), the initial result of the election was not known until November 17, the last day under state law for election results to be certified by each county's election officials.

One point of controversy was signatures on provisional and absentee ballots. In many eastern Washington counties, the county election offices were provided the political parties the names of people whose absentee and provisional ballots have been ruled invalid due to issues with missing or non-matching signatures. The Republican Party began calling these voters to inform them their ballot was invalid and to give them information on how to contact the election offices to get their ballots validated. The Democratic Party sought the same list from heavily Democratic King County but was rebuffed. The party sued, and on November 12 a King County judged ruled that the county election board would have to turn over the list of 936 voters with invalid ballots due to signature to all parties with candidates in the race. While the Democratic Party canvassed these residences from November 13 through the 16th, the GOP began sending vans into the rural counties to drive voters with invalid ballots to election offices.

Another state law allows for election officials to evaluate voter intent and manipulate ballots so that the machines can count the votes. Republicans filed a federal lawsuit to stop the manual manipulation of ballots, as it is not allowed as per federal law. This lawsuit was not successful since Washington state laws govern the elections within the state.

First results and recounts

The first ballot count was concluded on 17 November, and Secretary of State Sam Reed reported that Rossi held a lead of 261 votes. This was well within the margin (less than 0.5% and less than 2,000 votes) that automatically requires a full machine recount by state law. The state-wide recount was completed on November 24, showing Rossi with a lead of 42 over Gregoire. Of the 39 counties in Washington State, Rossi carried 32 and Gregoire 7. While Gregoire received less than 60% of the vote in the Democratic stronghold of King County, winning the county is equivalent to winning many of the smaller counties.

In Washington, a candidate may request up to two manual recounts, provided that they pay for the cost of each recount up front. If a manual recount overturns the outcome of an election, the state will then refund the money to the candidate. As Gregoire disputed the result, the Washington State Democratic Party gave a cheque for USD730,000 with the Secretary of State on 3 December. The Secretary of state issued the order for a recount on Monday, 6 December. The state GOP had also indicated before the machine recount that they would have sought a manual recount if the outcome in favour of Rossi were reversed.

Discovered ballots

King County Council Chairman Larry Phillips was at a Democratic Party office in Seattle on Sunday 12 December reviewing a list of voters whose absentee votes had been rejected due to signature problems, when to his surprise he found his own name listed. Certain that he had filled out and signed his ballot correctly, Phillips asked the county election officials to investigate the discrepancy. They discovered that Phillips' signature had somehow failed to be scanned into the election computer system after he submitted his request for an absentee ballot. When election workers received Phillips' absentee ballot in the mail, they could not find his signature in the computer system to compare to the one on the ballot envelope, so they mistakenly discarded the ballot instead of checking it against the signature of Phillips' voter registration card that was on file, which would have been standard operating procedure. The discovery prompted King County Director of Elections Dean Logan to order his staff to search the computers to see if any other ballots had been incorrectly rejected.

Logan announced on 13 December that 561 absentee ballots in the county had been wrongly rejected due to administrative error. The next day, workers retrieving voting machines from precinct storage found an additional 22 ballots, bringing the total to 583 newly discovered ballots. Logan admitted the lost ballots were an oversight on the part of his department, and insisted that the found ballots be counted. On 15 December, the King County Canvassing Board voted 2-1 in favour of counting the discovered ballots.

Upon examination of the discovered ballots, it was discovered that, with the exception of two ballots, none of the ballots had been cast by voters whose surnames began with the letters A, B, or C. There was a further search for more ballots, and on 17 December, county workers discovered a tray in a warehouse with an additional 150 previously uncounted ballots. All together, 723 uncounted or improperly rejected ballots were discovered in King County during the manual hand recount.

The state Republican party regarded the discovered ballots in King County cynically, with chairman Chris Vance saying that he was "absolutely convinced that King County is trying to steal this election." The National Rifle Association (NRA) sent a mass e-mail on 14 December to its members asking for volunteers to go to King County in order to sit in on the county elections office and observe the recount. The NRA had endorsed Rossi.

State Republicans, labelling the ballots "suspicious", filed suit to have a restraining order put on counting the ballots. The request was granted on 17 December, but Democrats appealed, which lead to a state Supreme Court hearing on 22 December. As the early results of the manual recount showed a single-digit lead for Gregoire, both sides expected the inclusion of the discovered ballots to increase her lead. Protesters gathered in front of both Democratic state headquarters and Republican state headquarters in the days after the injunction against King County's discovered ballots. On 21 December, Republican protestors in front of the Washington Supreme Court Building dressed in orange and held signs saying "Welcome to Ukraine", comparing the inclusion of the discovered ballots to the election fraud in the recent Ukrainian presidential election.[2] (http://www.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/12/22/85753.shtml) Protest websites appeared for both sides of the dispute, such as "Accidental Governor (http://www.accidentalgovernor.com)" and "How Gregoire The Grinch Stole Christmas (http://www.gregoirethegrinch.com)".

After all other counties submitted their recount votes, it was revealed on 20 December that at least five other counties besides King had included ballots that had been discovered after the initial count. For example, Snohomish County included 224 missed ballots that had been discovered underneath mail trays. The outcome of the Supreme Court hearing regarding King County's votes could have potentially affected those counties' counts as well.

Manual recount results

The state Democratic party claimed on 21 December that, without consideration of the 700 discovered ballots which were not counted due to an injunction, the result of the manual recount, including King County's votes, placed Gregoire ahead by eight votes across the state. Later on December 22, the preliminary recount results put Gregoire at a 10 vote lead.

The Washington State Supreme Court ruled on 22 December that counties explicitly have the ability to correct ballot consideration errors made during earlier counts. The next day, King County's final tally, including the disputed ballots, gave Gregoire a 130 vote lead, which was later revised to 129 when it was discovered that Thurston County had added a vote after certification had been completed. Since the recount results were in favour of the party requesting the recount, the Democrats were reimbursed the recount filing cost.

The Republicans were already preparing for further legal action before the final tally was announced by canvassing Republican voters whose ballots had been rejected. On 29 December, Rossi called for a re-vote, saying that "this election has been a total mess" and that a "revote would be the best solution for the people of our state and would give us a legitimate governorship". This solution had been rejected by the Democrats and the Secretary of State, which left a lawsuit the only other option for the Republicans. The Secretary of State officially certified the results of the manual recount on 30 December, declaring Gregoire the governor-elect.

Further legal challenge

The Washington Republican Party's first accusation of fraud was calling into question the discrepancy between the list of voters casting ballots in King County (895,660) and the number of ballots reported in the final hand recount (899,199). As an explanation, election officials claimed that they had yet to fianlise the list at the time, and argued that discrepancies in the two numbers are common and do not necessarily indicate fraud. As the election officials had expected, once the two lists were completed on 5 January, the two numbers were indeed very close to one another.

By law, the result of the election can be contested by any individual who file suit at any time up to 10 days after any inaugration, thereby making 22 January the latest date to have filed any suit. Two private citizens filed challenges to the election on 6 January: Daniel P. Stevens of Fall City and Arthur Coday Jr of Shoreline. The Republican party filed a suit on 7 January in Chelan County, a Republican stronghold, claiming that voters had been deprived of their right to a "free and fair election", and demanding a revote by special election.

Both suits did not ask that Gregoire's inauguration be delayed, allowing governor Gary Locke to leave his post as scheduled. Gregoire was inaugurated on 12 January. On 4 February, Judge John Bridges, assigned by Chelan County to preside over the case, ruled that the court did not have the authority to order a re-election. However, in the same ruling, he also rejected the Democrat's argument that the only the state legislature, which then had a Democratic majority, and not the court, had the sole authority to decide whether an election was invalid, thereby indicating that he intended to proceed to trial. Both sides delcared victory over this early pre-trial ruling.

Both sides used different arguments to prove their case. The Republicans presented data showing discrepancies in absentee ballot counts from 11 King County precincts. In some precincts, the county tallied more mail-in ballots than there were voters recorded as having voted by mail. In others, the opposite occurred: The county recorded more voters than ballots. The proof that ballots were fabricated for Democrats, Republican attorneys argued, is that four of the five precincts with the most excess mail-in ballots backed Gregoire. And the proof that ballots were misplaced or destroyed to harm Republicans is that four of the six precincts in which the most mail-in votes cannot be accounted for backed Republican Dino Rossi.

Democrats argued that evidence did not support this theory. For example, there were 703 King County precincts in which there were more absentee voters than ballots, not just six. The Republicans said in court that "ballots were undercounted mostly in precincts that backed [Rossi]", but 500 of these 703 precincts, or 71 percent, actually backed Gregoire. The Democrats also countered, allegning that there had been fradulent manipulation of some electronic voting machines. To prove this, the Democrats claimed that in Snohomish County, two-thirds of the electorate voted with paper absentee and provisional ballots, favouring Gregoire by 2,000 votes (97,044 to 95,228). The remaining one-third, voting electronically, favoured Rossi by an 8,000 vote advantage (50,400 to 42,145). The chances of this anomaly as a result of voters randomly choosing whether to vote by paper ballot or by touch screen is one in one trillion.

Furthermore, in precincts with voting machines that were repaired within two weeks of the election, Rossi had a touch screen advantage in 56 out of 58 (96.6%). The average margin for Rossi at these polling places were 11.58% more favorable than the absentee votes, and averaged 10.8% more than Gregoire on Election Day. However, the Republicans countered this by stating that among 90 precincts with no reported machine problems, 44 had touch screen vote counts more favourable to Rossi than the paper ballots from the same precinct, while 46 had a touch screen count that favoured Gregoire. This raises serious questions as to whether the machines requiring repairs were tampered with to improperly assign votes to Rossi. The Republicans also claimed that King County was three days past its federally required due date of 10 October to send out its absentee ballots to voters in the military, who tend ot vote Republican. The United States Postal Service Bulk Permit #1455 was used to mail 1,605 ballots on 2 October, and 28,000 on 13 October. The Republicans claimed that the delay could have prevented military servicepeople from voting, thereby skewing the results in King County.

Bridges denied a motion on 19 February by the Democrats which argued that the challengers must prove that the disputed ballots necessarily made a difference in the outcome of the election by showing how many of the ballots were cast for which candidate. The Republicans admitted that they could not provide this proof, but argued that the volume of illegal ballots, and the electorial tendencies of the counties in which they were cast, demonstrated a strong likelihood that the illegal ballots had led to Gregoire's victory. On 26 February, as a part of the Republican suit, Rossi's legal team produced a list of 1,135 felons, deceased people, or people who allegedly voted twice who attorneys claimed influenced the outcome.

As a solution to the problem of the illegal voters, the Republicans proposed a solution of "proportional reduction". Republicans claim that it should be assumed that illegal votes were cast in the same percentages as other votes in the same precinct. For example, in a precinct where Gregoire won 60 percent of the vote, it would have been assumed received 60 percent of the illegal vote as well, and those votes wold be subtracted from her total for the precinct. The Democrats countered that the best solution would be to call each of the felons into court and ask them to swear under oath which political candidate they voted for, after which time their vote would be removed from the total.

The trial began on 23 May, with both sides presenting their evidence of manipulation. Bridges delivered his ruling on 6 June, upholding the election of Gregoire. He stated that the judiciary should exercise restraint "unless an election is clearly invalid, when the people have spoken, their verdict should not be disturbed by the court." Nullifying the election, Brudges said, would be "the ultimate act of judicial egotism and judicial activism." He also concluded that according to his interpretation of the Washington Administrative Code, "voters who improperly cast provisional ballots should not be disenfranchised." He also rejected all claims of fraud and the Republican party's statistical analysis, concluding that the expert testimony of the Republican party was "not helpful" and that the proportional reduction theory was not supported under any law in the state. Striking another blow against Rossi's court case, he stated that "the court is more inclined to believe that Gregoire would have prevailed under statistical analysis theory," rejecting the Rossi's claim that the improperly cast ballots led to Gregoire's victory and that there was no evidence at all of anyone illegally voting for Gregoire.[3] (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/2002319056_webverdict06.html)

Bridges also removed five votes from the final count: four for Rossi and one for Ruth Bennett after hearing testimony from convicted felons who had voted for both candidates. After receiving such a negative verdict, Rossi declined to appeal to the state Supreme Court, claiming that the political makeup of the Court would make it impossible for him to win, thereby ending all legal challenges to the appointment of Gregoire as the Governor.

Fallout

The statewide controversy and election contest had notable repercussions across the state: from corrective government action, to increased interest in voter-initiated propositions of varied severity.

With the aim of reforming flaws in the state election system, many of which were uncovered during the course of the recounts, Gregoire, along with Reed, formed an election reform task force that travelled throughout the major cities of the state. The panel presented an array of recommendations on March 3, including such suggestions as holding primary elections at an earlier date, requiring ID at polling places, implementing a central statewide voter database, and regular audits of registration records. Some of the proposals could be implemented immediately under Reed's authority as Secretary of State. Many of the recommendations are the same as those proposed by the state Senate Government Operations and Elections committee on February 18. Other election reform proposals have suggested the state move to an entirely mail-based ballot system.

A vocal number of Republicans, declaring party disloyalty over his certification of Gregoire as governor, submitted a recall proposition to remove Sam Reed as Secretary of State. However, a Thurston County judge denied the move on February 15. Reed and his supporters insist that he followed the letter of the law and had no sufficient reason not to certify Gregoire.

The negative feelings caused by the election has led to further tension along the state's well-recognized geographic-political imbalance between Western Washington, which is largely urbanized and Democratic, and Eastern Washington, which is largely rural and Republican, has led to an increase in calls for the division of the state of Washington into two states based on this regional distinction. A proposal by Republican state Senator Bob Morton would form a new state out of the 20 contiguous counties of Eastern Washington, effectively dividing the state along the Cascade Range. Though popular in Eastern Washington, the measure is unlikely to pass the state Senate, and any new state creation would ultimately need to pass the United States Congress.

Results of initial count and recounts

Template:Washington gubernatorial election, 2004

References

• Recount status from the Secretary of State's website (http://vote.wa.gov/general/recount_resultsbycounty.aspx). Accessed 20 January 2005.
• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Elections (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/election2004/)
• The Seattle Times: Politics (http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/politics/)
• Tacoma News-Tribune: Election 2004 (http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/election2004/)
• Pacific NW Portal (http://www.nwprogressive.org/portal) Democratic bloggers defending the election of Christine Gregoire
• Sound Politics blog (http://www.soundpolitics.com/) (a Washington Republican raising questions about the integrity of the ballot)
• The Seattle Post-Intelligencer: No revote in governor dispute (http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/210906_gov05.html) (February 5, 2005)

External links

Candidates' websites

• Christine Gregoire (http://www.gregoire2004.com)
• Dino Rossi (http://www.dinorossi.com/)
• Ruth Bennett (http://www.bennettforgovernor.com/)