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January 19, 2005
More Washington Fraud
Stefan Sharkansky of sound politics has a good column today in the Seattle Times about the fraud that happened in the Washington governor election and points out evidence of fraud I did not realize existed: There were several thousand more ballots than there were voters.
The basic story of the election is that the original count and the first several recounts showed that the Republican won the race. They did a final recount after discovering serveral thousand new ballots from pro-Gregoire King County that put Gregoire ahead by 129 votes. This put the total number of ballots counted at several thousand more than the total number of people who actually voted. Many of the votes also included, "double voters, felon voters, cemetery voters and unidentified voters".
Sharansky also includes his sample list of reforms: "requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration; requiring every voter to show both a photo ID and a pulse; and requiring that an election can be certified only if the number of votes equals the number of voters." I agree with reqiring a photo ID and a pulse. I agree in theory about the proof of citizenship, but without having a national ID card this may be asking too much. Pretty much everyone eligible to vote has a drivers license or state picture ID card, but many people do not have a passport or other readily available proof of citizenship.
His final recommendation of only certifying an election if the number of voters equals the number of ballots is one that I will add to my list of voting reforms everyone who wants honest elections should support. I may allow for a small margin of error in this category if it does not effect the result of the election. For instance in an election with 1,000,000 voters and 1,000,010 ballots where the winner has over 200,000 more votes, then the extra 10 ballots would fall within the allowable margin of error. In the case of Washington the 129 vote margin of victory with 2,000 extra ballots would not fall within the margin of error and would not be certified.
Posted by Pete at January 19, 2005 10:00 AM
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