In the wee hours this morning, I wrote a diary called
WA Gov -- recount final ... now what?, which disappeared before a whole lot of Kossacks were awake enough to see it. In that diary, I examined, in some depth, the disposition of the 735 not-previously-tabulated ballots that extended Christine Gregoire's lead over Dino Rossi to the landslide, mandate margin of 130 votes.
Today has been mostly quiet while we wait for Secretary of State Sam Reed to certify the hand recount totals and officially declare that Gregoire is governor-elect. He'll do that on Thursday, we're told ... probably after returning from a brief, well-deserved holiday break.
This afternoon, however, the ever-so-slimy state GOP chair Chris Vance restarted his propaganda machine. A few notes below the fold...
(oh, "s/p" is "status/post" in medicalese ... meaning after or following)
In a story filed this afternoon by AP Political Writer David Ammons, we learn that Vance has "demanded" the complete list of
approximately 900,000 King County voters who submitted ballots in the election. Neither the AP writer nor Vance seems quite sure
why the state Republican party wants the list:
Republican state Chairman Chris Vance said the party and other backers of GOP candidate Dino Rossi have nagging questions about the vote-count in the county that tipped the race to Gregoire by a scant 130 votes last week.
"We want to know who voted in the election, and it's hard to know where we go from here (with a possible court challenge) before we get some answers," Vance said in an interview.
"We're mostly posing questions. King County is where we saw the votes changing. King County is the one county that was allowed to take ballots that were declared dead in November and bring them back to life in December."
He stopped short of committing to a court challenge of the election results.
Far be it from me to agree with that slathering, Rovian slimebucket Vance, but in this case I fully support his request. County elections chief Dean Logan should certainly send him the information he requests. It is, after all, public information.
I'd love to see precisely what Vance and his cronies are seeking from the county. In particular, unless they craft the request very precisely, it would be quite possible to either starve the Republicans or drown them in data:
- Comply extremely precisely and narrowly. If Vance wants a list of those who voted, send him voter ID numbers, and nothing but voter ID numbers. Let him and his techies do the work of connecting those ID numbers to something meaningful like names, addresses, and such. The file might look something like this list of returned absentee ballots in the 1st Legislative District.
- Comply with a full file dump. Each record in the voter file contains literally hundreds of fields -- several forms of the address, County Council districts, date of registration, flags indicating whether the person voted in previous elections (going back at least 10 years), flags for absentee/poll voter status, and so on. Give the whole shebang, megabyte upon megabyte, to Vance. But if he doesn't specificly ask for a field dictionary or column definitions, don't send them. After all, if he'd needed that, he would have asked, wouldn't he?
Either way, I can't think of many more productive uses of Chris Vance's time than wading through more Democrats than he's ever encountered before. Hey, Chris, get Dino in on the action while you're at it! It looks like he's going to have plenty of free time.
Finally, note that there's no mention of recanvassing other counties (the county auditors' association scotched that one) or of a vote in Thurston County, or of anything tangible. Vance is grasping at straws, and all he's going to find is the short one.