I will post them here! This is a very important race not only for WA but for our democracy in general!

Go Mrs. Gregoire!

Hey, CHRISTINE GREGOIRE has won by 130 VOTES and the republicans are already bitchin about absentee ballots. They never quit, they {the republicans} want to STEAL every election, and I for one am tired of it.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

4:25 p.m. December 23, 2004

SEATTLE – After a bruising election and two recounts, Democrat Christine Gregoire emerged as the winner by a 130-vote margin in Washington state's astonishingly close governor's race.

Republican Dino Rossi won the first count by 261 votes, then watched his lead shrink to 42 after a machine recount. His supporters say the protracted governor's race is not over yet.

Gregoire's lead in the statewide hand recount widened from 10 to 130 on Thursday after a Supreme Court decision allowed King County to include 732 mistakenly rejected ballots. King County, home of Seattle and a Democratic stronghold, was the last county to report final recount results on Thursday.

"Wooo-hooo!" exulted state Democratic Party spokeswoman Kirstin Brost moments after the results were announced. "We always believed she would win ... She focussed on the issues that really mattered to people."

Still, 10 or 100 or even 1,000 votes out of 2.9 million ballots cast is an awfully slim margin. The secretary of state has not yet certified the election results.

Republicans say they will continue to fight, and will ask the secretary of state to delay certifying the election so they can ask other counties to reconsider rejected ballots.

"This battle is not over," state Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance said. "We believe Dino Rossi is the legitimate Governor-elect of the State of Washington and we will continue fighting to protect his election."

Since Election Day, Gregoire has gone from favorite to underdog and back to favorite. A three-term state attorney general, Gregoire, 57, was widely viewed as the anointed successor to Democrat Gov. Gary Locke.

Rossi, 45, a real estate agent and former state senator, jumped into the race only after the GOP's first three choices declined to run.

Washington is a blue state – Democrats hold the majority in the Legislature, both U.S. senators are Democrats, and John Kerry won 53 percent of the statewide vote. Gregoire ran a cautious campaign, and promoted her plans for improving the state's economy, education and health care.

But Washington voters also flaunt a strong independent streak, and Rossi's sunny message of change caught on with swing voters.

Gregoire and Rossi spent about $6 million each during the campaign, a new state record, and outside groups spent millions more.

After Rossi won the first two counts, Democrats paid $730,000 for the hand recount. By law the state has to repay the party if the recount reverses the results.

"We asked for a hand count because we knew machines make mistakes," Brost said. "We believe that the hand count is the most accurate count and we're very excited by these results."

During the hand recount, King County election officials discovered that hundreds of ballots had been mistakenly rejected because of problems with how the voters' signatures had been scanned into the computer system. Over Republican objections, the state Supreme Court ruled Wednesday that state law allows county canvassing boards to correct mistakes in the returns, allowing King County to count those 732 ballots.

On Thursday morning, Republicans submitted affidavits to King County elections officials from 91 people who voted for Rossi and believe their ballots were erroneously rejected.

Dean Logan, the county's elections director and one of three members on its canvassing board, said those ballots would not be re-evaluated, because they had been properly considered and rejected.

Despite Republicans' requests, most auditors statewide have decided not to reconsider rejected ballots, said Corky Mattingly, Yakima County's auditor and president of the Washington State Association of County Auditors.

The auditors agree with Republican Secretary of State Sam Reed, Mattingly said, that state law prohibits counties from recanvassing after their results have been certified.

"This is the end," Mattingly said Thursday. "You don't just keep recertifying and recertifying."

Republicans have also accused King County of failing to send absentee ballots to military voters or sending them too late, and they want that mistake corrected, too.

Logan said all absentee ballots were sent out on time, including those to military voters.

"You will continue to hear accusations of fraud, of changing rules, of manufactured votes," Logan said Thursday, addressing rumors that have been flying on local blogs and talk radio. "I believe the record shows most of these allegations, if not all of them, are totally untrue."

Reed is scheduled to certify the election on Dec. 30. After that, Republicans may pursue a legal challenge. State law allows any registered voter to challenge election results.

An election challenge could go through state courts or possibly to the state Legislature – experts disagree on what the law says. If the losing side alleges possible violations of the equal protection clause in the U.S. Constitution, the election could end up in federal court.

"The (state) Supreme Court just changed the rules," State GOP Chairman Chris Vance said Wednesday. "Now we will aggressively fight by those new rules."

If further legal wrangling holds up the Jan. 12 inauguration of a new governor, lame-duck Gov. Gary Locke, a Democrat, may have to stay. A provision of the state constitution says the governor's term of office is four years "and until his successor is elected and qualified."

Locke has made it clear he is not interested in hanging around.

Hooray, finally a Democratic recount victory. I'd be willing to bet that any hand recounts in 2000 and 2004 would've yielded us a different president than the one we ended up with. <_<

Yes, we would have ended up with eight great years with THE REAL PRESIDENT and we all know who that is.

Yay! :clap:


http://www.hategun.com/store/index.html

I'm very happy for Christine she deserved it,all we want was to have this election to be fair and to have every single vote counted and we did and for everyone who got invovled in this recount should be applauded for their efforts.

Now that Christine has won hopefully this closes the book on this race.

I was skimming through some posts on Democratic Underground about this, and someone posted some frustrated responses they found on Free[k] Republic. It's pretty funny.

"Washinton state might as well become socialist."

"She will no doubt claim she has a MANDATE!"

"SELECTED..not elected"

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discu...1095723#1095802

:/ Wow.

DAMMIT, I'm not too happy about any of this, and I've read a lot of garbage about this race and how the republicans are trying to FIND some votes. What the hell is that supposed to mean??? They are going to invent votes that don't exist??? I thought about posting some of it here, but I was too angry after I got done with reading this trash. For once a recount goes in favor of a Democrat and I believe it was a fair and honest recount and as usual the republicans are right there trying to find a way to invent extra votes so they can steal still yet another election. Isn't anyone else tired of these stolen election or is it just me????

In one of my first major internet political debates a few months ago, I learned that Republicans argue with emotion and use emotionally manipulative tactics, and Democrats argue with facts. I've found that the best way for me to out-argue a Republican is to try to emotionally detatch myself from the things meant to evoke an emotional reaction, and just present the facts. Don't worry about what the Republicans think or say, you know the truth, you can see through the lies that they can't. Especially in a case like this were we won don't mind them, because the truth came out and prevailed, and they can't do anything about it.

Check this out from Democratic Underground:

8_year_nightmare Donating member (1000+ posts)
Fri Dec-24-04 10:05 AM
Response to Original message
65. Wooohooo! A victory against the RSVP (Republicans Steal the Votes Party)!

Let this victory serve as an example of why Kerry's votes need to be recounted!

As I said in a previous post, Democrats are supposed to just roll over and play dead when elections are stolen (even major elections such as for president). If we complain, we're accused of being whiners and sore losers. But just try to wrestle an ill-gotten election away from a Republican, and look who suddenly turns into whiners and sore losers! If they're willing to dish it out, then they'd better be prepared to eat it. <_<

Again this is just the spin of the right wing media. If the situation was reversed it would be a noble Republican trying to make sure that the people's will was done standing up to the evil election stealing Democrats.
The first thing we need to do is first the 'GOP noise machine'. I'm not of the most effective way but we have to do it somehow.

So are they going to let her take office? I have heard they are going to re-vote in Washington state. Hope she gets in...we need every victory we can get. For once we need to win one of these and not let the Republicans finagle the votes to steal it like they usually do.

Well, we once thought this was over, but it doesn't look like it will end anytime soon. Apparently they may have added in provisional ballots in the count of King County, which could be grounds for a revote if took to court:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/poli...recount05m.html

Election scrutiny reveals provisional-vote flaws

By Keith Ervin

Seattle Times staff reporter

An unknown number of provisional voters, some of whom may not even have been registered to vote, improperly put their ballots directly into vote-counting machines at polling places, King County's elections superintendent said yesterday.

Once those ballots went into the machines, there was no way to separate them from legitimate ballots.

Provisional ballots are given on Election Day to voters who show up at the wrong precinct or whose registration is in question. The ballots are supposed to be put inside two envelopes, with the voter's name, address and signature on the outside, and counted only after the voter's status is verified.

Officials may never know exactly how many provisional ballots were improperly fed into voting machines, but a current review of polling-place records will give some indication of how widespread the problem was, county Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens said.

Improperly cast provisional votes could play a role in a possible Republican challenge of Democrat Christine Gregoire's 129-vote victory over Republican Dino Rossi, whose campaign is preparing to ask that the election be set aside.

Miscast provisional votes could be one reason the number of ballots counted in King County outnumbered the list of voters who voted by 3,539.

"What part of it was it?" Huennekens said. "I don't know. Did it happen? Yes. Unfortunately, that's part of the process in King County, where we have over 2,600 precincts and over 540 polling locations and nearly 4,000 workers. It's a very human process, and in some cases that did happen."

State Republican Party Chairman Chris Vance, who plans to discuss the provisional-ballot issue at a news conference today, said it constituted a serious lapse in election security.

"We have very, very loose standards and procedures," he said. "I don't think our system in this state takes fraud and accuracy seriously."

In King County, a record 27,641 provisional ballots were counted in the election; 1,791 others were disqualified either because the voter wasn't registered or the signature on the ballot envelope didn't match the signature on file.


But in some cases, Huennekens said, poll workers mistakenly instructed provisional voters to put ballots directly into machines. In other cases, voters disregarded instructions and put their ballots into machines while workers were busy.

"I can't completely fault our poll workers 100 percent in this matter, especially when you're dealing with over 300,000 voters at the polls. People come in all kinds of varieties and shapes and sizes," Huennekens said.

He said there was no evidence of voter fraud.

Jim Rigby, a Republican observer at a polling place in the lobby of the King County Administration Building on Election Day, said that the scene was "chaos" and that he objected when one man walked into the building and promptly shoved a ballot into the vote-counting machine.

Rigby said others at the poll site saw two other voters put provisional ballots in the machine.

Teams of workers yesterday began comparing poll-book entries with computer records as part of "reconciling" the numbers, an activity that occurs after every election. Results are to be released Friday.

It's not the first election King County has had difficulty getting the numbers of voters and ballots to match. In the 2003 off-year general election, the number of ballots cast exceeded the number of voters by 606, even after reconciliation was completed.

In 2002 and 2000, the problem was reversed. Voters credited with voting exceeded the number of ballots by 2,809 in 2002 and by 7,770 in 2000.

Part of the discrepancy this year reflects 74 domestic-violence victims who voted but whose names aren't included in the published voter list and 484 military and overseas voters who cast mail ballots under special rules, Huennekens said.

County Elections Director Dean Logan has said he expects most of the remaining discrepancy to be explained by inaccuracies in accounting for votes at the polls and by failure to update a computer database.

Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com