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WA Governor Recount Ends With 42-Vote Difference
Republican Dino Rossi came out on top of the gubernatorial recount in Washington state, beating Democrat Christine Gregoire by 42 votes. He had won the initial count by 261 votes. King County (where Seattle is) gave Gregoire a 245-vote swing. It's expected that the Democrats will call for a partial hand recount, which they would have to pay for (25 cents per vote), unless they end up winning the recount.
Ukraine
Sounds to me like Kerry could finance it from the unused portion of his warchest alone.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
Change "JesusLand" to include Washington state you loser! You dumbocrats must be really crying in your soup now.
Well, with a vote count like that, there's no reason for a recount - it's gotta be the right answer :)
so what happens now? Just keep recounting until the Democrat wins? And what then? Why not recount one more time? Where do you draw the line?
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Dear Voter,
See? We told you recounts would have no affect on the results. Move along.
Sincerely,
D. Ashcroft
nos laetus epulor qui would domito nos
This whole recount thing is embarrasing. At least in the Ukraine it is a deliberate attempt to falsify election results. In the US it's just plain incompetence. The result is the same: the wrong guy elected.
You don't just lose hundreds of votes using modern technology. What kind of retards are doing the counting anyway? How can you guys preach democracy to others if you can't even organize an election in your own country?
Actually Rossi is Pro-life white trash. Also Dems had the biggest turnouts in the Convention in the states history. There was too much critical mass to be this close an election. Same for the national. There was fishy things going on here as well. Well We'll see. I personally support a recount.
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
Have to be POOR to be pro-life white trash- otherwise there's INTERNAL hypocricy going on.
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I'm such a nerd. I really think that elections should have margins of error and something should happen if candidates don't win by at least that much. Something tells me that 0.0015% quantifies as sufficiently small to be below it.
Oh well--I really do think that this reflects the will of WA voters (and I am one). We didn't have a strong preference. Approximately 50,000 (2% or 1000x the margin of victory for Dino Rossi) more people voted for president than voted for our governor. Our divided state house & senat also bears out how moderate we are.
There's going to be a hand recount if I'm not mistaken. 42 votes is within a margin of error especially with the anomalies with provisional ballots or whatever.
Does anyone think the plurality system is partly responsible for such a close race?
I think I'll be satisfied with whomever wins as long as the hand recount is done properly. One more time is all we should really need.
Now that I think about it, the electoral college is good for a reason. Can you imagine a national recount? It would be absolutely terrible. Even a state-wide election is hard enough to run.
Why don't we just have electors for the governor's seat? We can send one elector from each legislative district, and then have them choose the governor. This way, a recount would only be warranted in districts that are close. (Districts in WA are about 100,000 people). Since the voting is much more local, it is much less subject to fraud and thus the unwarranted accusation of fraud.
The radical sect of Islam would either see you dead or "reverted" to Islam.
And thus spake Deep Thought:
"By how many votes will Dino Rossi win the 2004 Washington State gubernatorial election recount?"
Yep that's how things should be. There's a big difference between a machine counted result of 77.434% of the votes and a hand counted result of 60.2% of the votes.
Even though a hand recount could have less precision (e.g. 100 times less precise), it may be more accurate esp if representatives from the affected parties and independent(?) observers are there to witness each count (this is how vote counts are done in my country btw). And anyway even if it is all a show, rational and reasonable voters should be more likely to accept such a result counted that way[1].
BUT the widespread lack of commonsense, ignorance and stupidity is quite staggering though. So it seems that the voters don't really care anyway.
Also get the impression that many if not most voters of the winning party stupidly don't and won't care either- as long as their party wins they are happy. The degree of partisanship in the US is gross - "No matter what happens - XXX is right".
If these people like that sort of thing they should not vote - just stay at home and watch "pro wrestling" on TV.
[1] If the electorate are going to be screwed anyway, at least make them take a lot of trouble to do so. Don't make it easy for them by just settling for machine counts.
The "margin" of error could be said to be this...
Provisional ballots that weren't originally counted
Ballots that were spit out and set aside
Diebold optical machines wrongly counting the bubbled in sheet
Forty-two.
That's it. That's all there is.
--
This post is a troll, but Mr. Adams is insightful.
Since you speak for the group, what clearly definable event prior to which it is not alive and after which he/she is alive?
What i mean is, at which point has the fetus tagged 'base' and is 'safe'?
Moderators: Was this funny because the poster doesn't know John Ashcroft's first name, or because the poster fails to understand that Ashcroft has nothing to do with state recount issues?
-- No matter how great your triumphs or how tragic your defeats, approximately one billion Chinese couldn't care less.
The Washingtong State Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance says: "If Dino Rossi is ahead at the end of the day, he is the governor-elect, this is over, and she (Gregoire) needs to do the right thing, the gracious thing and the honorable thing and concede."
But if Gregoire is ahead at the end of the recount? "That's fundamentally different," Vance said.
Vance is also talking about how "...we will preserve all our options,...".
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews
Rather than crying about the Democrats, in this case, the Republicans should be joining with them and pooling their resources to pay for a state-wide hand recount.
But they aren't doing that.
Nor are they willing to say right now that they will accept whatever the results are.
And I find it hilarious that you are quoting NIXON about "the harm it would do to the nation". What's next? Quoting Clinton about morality?
Looks like we've got more than 150,000 valid equal rights claims in Ohio, based on the evidence that voting queue length correlates to historical precinct support. I wonder whether any nonlocal Democrat lawyer wants to be destracted by Washington. However, based on the clear evidence emerging from Florida, I would not advise any Democrat with the ability to pay for a recount to give up anywhere.
Who pays for the recount if the dems win?
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
the error in the initial count favors the Republican.
... is a strong third party or two which will serve to split the vote somewhat. This will help avoid the 50-50% elections we always have. But the two big parties have put pressure on the media not to mention the Libertarians or the Greens at all if possible. The two big parties don't WANT third-parties having a chance. And the bullies fight third-parties, even though it would benefit society as a whole in multiple ways.
It's not about left or right anymore; it's about class warfare. Rich vs. poor. And by poor I mean anyone earning under $750,000 per year. You probably don't know it, but your quality of life is being silently stolen from you right now, and unless things in America change, all will be lost by the time our children can vote.
Since when do facts matter to you neo-cons? *rimshot*
In the Kennedy/Nixon election, Richard Nixon lost the vote under extremely suspect circumstances. He made the deliberate decision not to pursue because of the harm it would do to the nation.
Republicans persued (fruitless) recounts in about a dozen different states and dragged (fruitless) investigations in Illinois out for a year.
Nixon presented a public front of not challenging for the "good of the nation"(which you've obviously swallowed hook, line and sinker) but did everything in his power to challenge the results behind the scenes.
The wife replacing the husband in the middle of the race was probably illegal under Missouir law
She didn't replace him on the ballot. Ashcroft lost to a dead man. The (Republican I think) Governor just made it known that if Mel Carnahan won, he'd appoint Jean Carnahan in his place, which he did.
the Republican decided not to pursue the matter
What would he persue exactly?
I know they wouldn't, because they Didn't. Six years ago Tom Daschle won his senate seat by less than 500 votes, most of which were extremely suspect. His Republican challenger refused to drag the results out, saying that it would do more harm than good.
You're thinking of Thune's loss to Johnson and he *did* drag investigations out with allegations of massive fraud. And guess what? Nothing turned up.
And who can forget Bob Dornan who dragged out investigations of his narrow loss to Loretta Sanchez in 1996 for two years? Again, Republican alleged massive vote fraud and nothing materialized. And then Dornan got his ass smacked by Sanchez in 1998.
Basically, here's the pattern:
Republicans lose narrowly.
They allege massive vote fraud when it doesn't exist so as to taint the victory of their opponent.
They publicly say they're taking the high road and not persuing any legal options.
They privately persue any and all legal options.
They come up empty.
Well, there is a difference, on the *law* recognizes: it's the difference between a recount affirming the result, and overturning it. The law treats those two outcomes differently, as Vance said.
What result? Until the machine recount was finished last week, there was no result. No winner was certified.
so what happens now? Just keep recounting until the Democrat wins? And what then? Why not recount one more time? Where do you draw the line?
The line's drawn in the law. The machine recount was automatic because of the close margin. (A manual recount would've been done if the margin were 100 votes closer initially)
Now that a winner has finally be certified. A manual recount can be requested. Once/If it's done, that's it.
This it how it works:
Gregoire can request a manual recount of certain or all counties, but she has to put down a deposit of 25 cents for each vote to pay for the recount. That would be roughly $700,000 for every vote in the state. If it changes the margin, she gets the deposit back and the state pays for the recount. If not, the money is gone.
Obviously, $700,000 is a lot. But she can request a recount just in certain counties and put down a smaller deposit. If the count there is enough to change the results, the state initiates and pays for a statewide recount. If it doesn't change the outcome, she loses her deposit.
Either way, that'll be the end of the matter. Our state election laws are pretty well laid out. Given the tight margin and given that some counties somehow came back with *fewer* votes in the machine recount than the original count, I don't see how anyone can argue that a manual recount shouldn't be done.
...pointing out that Pudge is a good modern Republican. One who knows that he'll lose his card carrying GOP status if he doesn't engage in blatant double standards and hypocracy on a regular basis. Do you think for a nanosecond that he wouldn't be taking the opposite position if Gore had won by a few hundered votes in 2000 and the Democratic candidate was leading by 42 today? This isn't about statistics or democracy, this is about smearing recounts because the GOP candidate is ahead. Just like 4 years ago.
In summary, though, we mostly (perhaps begrudgingly) agree that:
- There should be a study conducted of how much votes swing with recounts. This may also help us find (and therefore compare) the errors in elections.
- There is no guarantee we will have a voter-verifiable audit trail. Most think it is a good idea, so we will hopefully have one.
- The handling of provisional ballots isn't completely dictated by federal law, but perhaps it should be for the sake of uniformity
- A hand recount wasn't mandatory in this case, but perhaps it should have been.
- Voting isn't perfect now, but is being improved.
There are also some points that I think I'm right about that I'd probably never convince you of, unless you read up on error analysis:- Error analysis can and should be used in vote counting, in the same way it is used in the physical sciences for any measurement
- The law should acknowlege that the precision of the vote isn't perfect. If there is a procedure for ties (such as sending it to the legislative branch), perhaps there should be a procedure to handle cases where the lack of precision could undermine accuracy.
- All counts should be done at a high enough level of quality that there'd be no reason to implicitly trust a later recount over an earlier count. The value of a recount would then include adding to the statistical confidence of a decision.
And, in the interest of fairness, a few concessions:Washington state has adopted new, uniform rules that apply to all 39 counties, defining what is a vote and what is not. Also, the rules now require that all counties check all ballots by hand before they are run through the machines the first time. That's one reason the vote count changed so little between the first and second counts: In effect, we've combined a hand count with a machine count. So why do another recount just by hand when it's already been done and double checked by a machine?
BTW, for anyone who thinks the little "I voted" receipt they recieved means diddly, it doesn't. There is no way for ANYONE, in any state in our union to verify that their vote was in fact counted, and NO way for anyone to verify that votes were not made up, and so on, and so on.
... otherwise the term "stuffing the ballot box" would never have been invented.
t hesis/all.pdf
We need a major FEDERALLY MANDATED VOTING REFORM ACT with complete transparency in the whole process including voter registration, vote casting, tabulation, and accounting and auditing. The end result will inevitably combine computers and the internet, public key encrtyption, AND a paper trail, into a system where EVERYONE can validate their vote (while still absolutely retaining their privacy), where EVERYONE can count the votes (how long does it take a computer to count to a million these days? 2 seconds?), where EVERYONE can verify that no more votes were counted than voters registered, and where blind trust in counts done behind closed doors (whether by machines, by hand, or by aliens from planet zork) is eliminated.
Finally, please remember that paper ballots are not the answer
For an interesting study on the beginnings of such a system, and to get an idea of the social changes that would be required, check out
http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~cis/voting/herschberg-
Also it is worth noting that a system that relies on statistical probability is not appropriate. We should have 16 digits of precision on this issue
By this time, it is not as simple as counting.
The problem is that there are many ballots that are misused. Maybe provisional ballots wrongly cast, ballots with two votes for the same office, etc.
That is what they want to review.
The better word the recount would be to make new judgement calls. Should this vote count? What about this, it seems like candidate x is more filled out for this office than candidate y (since they are both filled in). Etc.
So, more recounts beyond this point would hand the election over to lawyers. So whichever laywer gives the best arguments wins the election for his candidate.
The recounts need to stop.