From here:
The night before Washington's secretary of state was scheduled to certify Democrat Christine Gregoire as the governor-elect, her Republican rival Dino Rossi called for a complete re-do of the longest, closest governor's race in state history."The uncertainty surrounding this election process isn't just bad for you and me - it is bad for the entire state. People need to know for sure that the next governor actually won the election," Rossi said Wednesday evening, reading from a letter he sent to Gregoire.
"A revote would be the best solution for the people of our state, and would give us a legitimate governorship," the letter added.
Gregoire, the three-term state attorney general who fought America's tobacco industry, Internet porn and schoolyard bullying, won a hand recount by a scant 129 votes out of more than 2.8 million cast.
Gregoire's spokesman Morton Brilliant said she would not be joining Rossi's call. "It's irresponsible to spend $4 million in taxpayer money on a new election just because you don't' like losing this one," Brilliant said.
More than eight weeks after Election Day, the Republican secretary of state, Sam Reed, on Thursday planned to certify the results of the unprecedented third vote tally. The statewide hand recount put Gregoire ahead for the first time, by just a tiny fraction of 1 percent.
Rossi, the former state Senate budget committee chairman, won the regular tally last month by 261 votes, triggering an automatic machine recount. He won that count, too, by 42 votes.
Democrats, aided by presidential candidates John Kerry and Howard Dean, rounded up $1 million in donations, mostly online, to order the hand recount.
That count, done precinct by precinct by bipartisan teams with swarms of observers watching, showed Gregoire ahead by just 10 votes. After Democrats and election officials got permission from the state Supreme Court, a batch of more than 700 wayward ballots in King County was tallied, stretching her lead to three digits.
While noting that he could contest the election, Rossi said a legal challenge could drag on for weeks or months. The better way to clear up the mess, he said, would be to ask lawmakers to pass a bill calling for a special election as soon as the Democrat-controlled state Legislature convenes in early January for the 2005 session.
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Article comments
1 - JR
So. Now that the Democrats have managed to find enough votes to "win" this election, they want the process ended. I'm not at all surprised.
So. The Republicans want to keep counting votes until they have enough to "win". I'm not at all surprised.
2 - Temple A. Stark
Does anyone really think Dino Rossi would have agreed to a revote if it were the other way around?
C'mon now - enough of this fake outrage. Politics is what it is.
3 - Anna
It's a close vote. No matter which side of the aisle you sit, a vote this close would be contested by any loser. Taking potshots and making hot-headed partisan comments doesn't help the situation.
4 - DrPat
I also understood that the Republicans had filed a broad FIA request (12-23) to help determine how undervote and overvote ballots were assessed, and to find out if military ballots had been edged out by sending them too late.
It is a close vote. Many states have specific methods (including re-balloting) to determine the winner in races this close.
5 - lame
I find some irony in the fact the Dino Rossi originally won by a margin so close that it triggered an automatic statewide recount, yet he called on Christine Gregoire to concede, called himself governor-elect, and even toured the Governor's Mansion with his family.
The whole time, he and the state Republican party fought to disallow as many votes in the recount as they possibly could.
Now that he has lost the manual recount, he and the state Republican Party are trying to find uncounted Republican votes, even though the vote has been certified and they are thus headed into uncharted waters.
The sheer arrogance and hypocracy of the Republican Party today makes me long for some good old-fashioned Democratic sleaze and corruption.
This is not my father's Republican Party. What the hell happened to it?
Not that it matters. Our terminally disfunctional State Legislature will not be improved with either Gregoire or Rossi as Governor.