April 21, 2006
Why does it seem that Washington is the only state that doesn't enforce integrity in elections?

Earlier this week the Tennessee State Senate ousted newly elected member Ophelia Ford because of election irregularities

[An investigating committee] found that 12 votes were not valid because the voters were either dead, felons or residents of other districts. Ford won the September election by 13 votes.
...
The report concluded that "illegalities so permeated the conduct of this extraordinarily close special election as to render … its results incurably uncertain and untrustworthy."
If only Judge Earring had approached his task with as much common sense.

hat tip: J.A.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at April 21, 2006 09:15 AM | Email This
Comments
1. Note that Sen. Ford had the grace to step down on her own.

Posted by: Heartless Libertarian on April 21, 2006 09:32 AM
2. I would wager that Tennessee does not have a monument to the architect of one of history's most efficient engines of human suffering either. Is there a connection? I would argue that it is likely that there is, but then again I tend to not give the benefit of the doubt to those who worship at the feet of a statue of the Father of Gulags, Gas Ovens & Torture (if you doubt that they do indeed celebrate Lenin and by extension everything he stood for May Day isn’t that far off, swing by and have a look for yourself). The whole concept of the principals this country was founded on are foreign to the likes of these people. Just the fact that the citizens of Seattle tolerate such a monstrosity speaks volumes regarding their character, or lack there of.

Posted by: JDH on April 21, 2006 09:38 AM
3. well said, JDH. I'm embarassed that my relatives fought--and yes, DIED--against totalitarians like Lenin and now these thugs and their murderous ideology are celebrated as "freedom fighters." It's enough to make you PUKE.

Posted by: libertarianobserver on April 21, 2006 09:52 AM
4. Because Washington is Moonbat Ground Zero. There's more diversity of opinion in New York and San Francisco than in Seattle. I know, I've live in both.

Moonbats like Goldstein view their progressive entitlement mentality as birthright. Once he migrated here, Goldstein knew he had found his Moonbat brethren.

Vote fraud is welcome here by most leaders. Look at how vigrously they all defended the Larry Phillips ballots in 2004. And everyone from Reed to Maleng that could even examine the problem knows that they are barely tolerated by the Moonbat establishment and only keep their jobs for their willingness to look the other way.


Posted by: Jeff B. on April 21, 2006 09:56 AM
5. Now, now Stefan...

You know we can't make fun of judge Bridges...hell, we hand-picked him in a republican dominated county so that the truth would come out.

Just because you don't like the truth, you can't just go around making fun of everyone associated with a decision you don't like.

That type of mentality will make you look like a childish buffoon...and we wouldn't want that!

Posted by: rossi too on April 21, 2006 10:26 AM
6. Yet another place that has fair and honest elections. When will Washington get fair and honest elections??

Posted by: pbj on April 21, 2006 10:31 AM
7. I guess those poor Hillbillies in Tennessee do not know how to count!!!

Posted by: Pacific Grove Phlash on April 21, 2006 10:52 AM
8. I don't know; why DOES it seem that WA doesn't care about election fraud?? KC has been outed by this blog for it, that is a start. Which is more than has been done in the past. It is a small bit of progress. We can hope for more. But it needs to be SO much better!

Posted by: Misty on April 21, 2006 10:55 AM
9. Residents of Northern Idaho were tagged with a reputation for being Neo-Nazis based upon the fact that a very small minority of the population was either involved in, or were supporters of the Arian Nations ‘Church.’ But it is a FACT that while it was well known to the entire media establishment that members and their supporters never amounted to any significant portion of the population of Northern Idaho the media still portrayed Northern Idahoans as followers of an ideology that was responsible for human misery and suffering on a grand scale. Let’s take a look at this – Not only did the Arian Nations not erect a monumental statue of Adolph Hitler in a suburb of Cordelane Idaho, if they had even attempted the entire population of Northern Idaho would banded together have removed it, root and branch, using whatever force necessary.

Contrast this with the compassionate folks that inhabit Freemont, or even metropolitan Seattle for that matter. They either know, or should know the legacy of Lenin, yet they tolerate a shrine to him and what he stood for in their public square. This alone speaks to the sincerity of their ‘compassion’ that they wear about on their sleeves as a badge of honor.

Unfortunately that average American no longer has what it takes to look at this situation and analyze it for him or herself. The fact that they are not exposed to the horrors of the former Soviet Union by the Lenin and Stalin’s apologists, who by the way make up the majority of teachers in public (and Jesuit) middle and high schools doesn’t help this situation any.

Posted by: JDH on April 21, 2006 11:02 AM
10. Why? The explanations I get out of most people in Seattle is that "well, 'they' did it over in Florida, so why can't we here." Usually, quickly followed by a "servers them right!"

Yes, that is a very sad statement on status of democracy in WA State. Of course, cheating ourselves of our own democracy isn't going to do much to change anything at the national level. And, if one wants to make a point one can be proud of, it would seem that demonstrating that our state protects the democratic process would be the thing to do.

But, no, silly Seattle "progressives" (e.g., control freaks) would prefer to shoot themselves in the foot.

Posted by: BananaLand on April 21, 2006 11:52 AM
11. 1 Unfortuneately Jeff B is right about Puget Sound being the home of Team Moon Bat
2 Tin Foil U is alive and well in Seattle w/ branch campuses up and down the I-5 and I-90 corridors throughout The State
3 This was quite apparent w/ the UW School of Medicine and Harborview Medicare/caid fraud and the duping of the US Attorney General in settlement negotiations
4 In NJ when similar things occurred the Ds who were governor and US Seantor stood up and said "this is not acceptible, you're out of here"
5 Here in limousine liberal land Gary Locke and Ron Sims believe that rules apply only to the little people and not to us and government employees
6 Mainstream Republicans invites Paul Ramsay, Dean of UW Medical School to talk
http://www.washingtonmainstream.org/newsletters/MainstreamNL.pdf
7 I'd bet "dollars to donuts" that he had a group hug w/ fellow moonbats Sam Reed and Norm Maleng and chuckled all the way home on his drive back to Seattle on how gullible Mainstream is
8 Here is Washington State no one cares
9 The only hope I can think of is approaching "an entreprenuer w/ a law degree" who lives in the Columbia Tower named The Berman
10 Steve is quite convincing when speaking w/ corporate and government officials who short change customers.
11 Unfortuneately, my hunch is that he's probably a D and the monetary value of damages is insufficent.
12 But Steve did go after Moon Bat Paul Schnell (who told vehicles owners to f themselves) w/ a class action lawsuit about the broken parking meters, so may be there's hope

Posted by: Green Lake Mark on April 21, 2006 12:04 PM
12. This is why we need a real leader. We are becoming the "walk on by" state w/ no regard for one another.

Link is to where I got the idea - a British conservative.

Posted by: A Watchdog on April 21, 2006 12:09 PM
13. The article you link to says the evidence uncovered met the legal standard that the true election result was "incurably uncertain."

This is a reasonable legal standard. Note that it is very different from the law in Washington state, which defines more stringent standards for disputed votes. It sounds like your quarrel is with the law, not with Judge Bridges. We wouldn't want judges legislating from the bench, would we?

Posted by: Bruce on April 21, 2006 04:42 PM
14. "We wouldn't want judges legislating from the bench, would we?"

No, that's what democraps do.

Of course, that isn't what anyone on the right side of this issue wanted anyway.

Bridges could have just as easily ruled that, because the outcome of the race couln't be reasonable decided, it needed to be set aside and a revote occur. That would have been a decision within his purview and I'm bett!ng that the WSSC wouldn't have overruled him.

So what?

As you lefty morons say, "move on"!

We just want to move on with equitable elections.

Posted by: alphabet soup on April 21, 2006 05:21 PM
15. Why do we have such a problem? I’ll just quote my ex neighbor (who coincidently was from Tennessee) when he announced he was moving and why: “This is the most corrupt state I’ve ever lived in.” He didn’t express why he thought that, and I didn’t ask (stupid me, he obviously knew something I didn’t) but it was before Gregoire was “elected”. I often wonder what he’d say now.

Posted by: G Jiggy on April 21, 2006 09:22 PM
16. I don't understand why you people keep having such a problem with this. Judge Bridges informed the plaintiffs of the standard that they had to meet, and they utterly and totally failed to produce a single piece of hard evidence that would come anywhere close to meeting that standard. (Their filing did not allege fraud, but one of their attorneys did, so Bridges even allowed them to pursue that line of inquiry. Thus, his decision notes that no evidence of fraud appeared in his court.) By contrast, the intervenors, who needed to prove nothing, did show proof that the plaintiffs' entire argument was a fallacy, based upon the false belief that felons vote like their enfranchised neighbors.

To reduce the margin of error, simply subtract the majority of felons' votes from Rossi's total, just as the evidence suggests. Voila, Gregoire has won a clear victory. After the GOP spent millions of dollars to obtain that result, you could at least use it.

(It's off thread, but the small-business owners of Fremont erected the statue of their nemesis to mock his failed ideology, and ol' Vlad routinely gets abused by the locals. The aetheist gets decorated with lights at the Holiday season, and the married despot appears tarted up in drag for Gay Pride. Symbolic abuse is the worst we can do to him now, and so we do it with gusto.)

Posted by: Paddy Mac on April 22, 2006 12:01 AM
17. Paddy Mac:
You're wrong about the worst we can do to him. The worst we could do to him is to ignore/forget about him. Remove his impact entirely. Take the disgusting statue down! Like they did with Saddam!

Posted by: katomar on April 22, 2006 07:32 AM
18. Forgetting about Lenin, or Hitler, or any other such person, would be the WORST thing we could possibly do to ourselves, and for future generations. We must always remember what humans can do when they blindly follow leaders or ideologies. Fremont Square has a statue to our great victory in the Cold War, and I hope we will keep it for many generations.

Posted by: Paddy Mac on April 22, 2006 08:47 AM
19. "I don't understand why you people keep having such a problem with this."

That's because you're not too bright.

What I can't figure is why you haven't "moved on" like the rest of us.

Fraudoire is a sham and about as corrupt as they come, but I recognize that she is (for the moment) our sitting Governor (much to our everlasting shame).

You can continue to dance around the core of the problem that caused the election upset - vote fraud and incompetence. It is what precipitated the challenge to the 2004 election and it remains today. You stand there and stupidly claim "Dismissed with prejudice" all day, but that doesn't change the fact that there were 1100 more votes than voters, and as a consequence fraudoire (and her toilet-drinker supporters like paddy-cakes) can never claim a legitimate election.

That Bridges didn't have the courage to do the right thing and vacate the election is a shame, but there it is. He could have just as easily done it, and been within his right to do so. It would have been expensive and intrusive, but it would have set a message that says: "The citizens of this state demand clean, fair elections".

His failure sends the opposite message. We're trying to change that, and you're standing in the way.

Hope you don't get run over (not)

Posted by: alphabet soup on April 22, 2006 09:14 AM
20. "Fremont Square has a statue to our great victory in the Cold War, and I hope we will keep it for many generations."

To this, I can agree (in principle).

So lets dump that miserable loser POS Lenin and replace it with a statue of the one who brought us victory in the Cold War - Ronald Reagan!

(Can't you just picture the response from Moonbat Central?!)

Posted by: alphabet soup on April 22, 2006 09:20 AM
21. Tennessee judge vacates an election for 12 illegal votes (race seperated by 13 votes).

Washington judge refuses to vacate an election after admitting prosecution proved 1,600 illegal votes (race seperated by less than 150 votes).

G Jiggy...I have known several people/families to leave Washington in the past year...because of the corruption.

Makes me feel special.

Posted by: dl on April 22, 2006 11:18 PM
22. The original post confused two issues. A legislative body normally has the final say on whether to seat an elected member. For example, Article I of our federal Constitution explicitly gives this power, without limitation, to each House of Congress. If that state legislature's investigation gives them grounds to refuse a Member under the laws and Constitution of Tennessee, then no citizen of any other state should comment upon it.

By contrast, the plaintiffs Borders et. al. faced a much higher standard, set in the laws of our state, which Judge Bridges could not modify. Even if he had accepted every last one of the plaintiffs' claims, and rejected all of the intervenors' evidence, the court would have found only that a statistical inference suggested that Chris Gregoire had received fewer votes than had Dino Rossi. The plaintiffs would have proven nothing, even if their statistical model had been valid, and not the complete fallacy that it was. They would have still been a very long way from satisfying the requirements of our state's laws. Hence, Judge Bridges called the plaintiffs' request of him by an aptly descriptive term :"judicial activism".

Which is exactly what the original post yearned for, yet again.

Posted by: Paddy Mac on April 23, 2006 12:38 PM
23. That is old stuff being rehashed, with a liberal spin. Judge Bridges made the correct call based on the evidence shown (the Republicans blew it). Gregoire was a lame duck Governor before she was ever selected. Check back in 2008.

Posted by: KS on April 23, 2006 02:45 PM
24. Paddy Mac...YOU miss the point. Elections in Washington (esp. King County) are illegal and likely unconstitutional. There are multiple violations of local, state, and federal election laws. And that is THE ONLY RELEVANT FACT.

Why do you criticize other states that demand and enforce fair and legal elections? Afraid that the same will be demanded in Washington? Maybe you should censor the media so that stories of illegal elections being vacated can be banned...

Posted by: dl on April 24, 2006 08:28 AM
25. This original post was a fine example of 'ignoratio elenchi', because the legislative perogatives in one state have nothing to do with a judge an another state upholding his state's laws.

"There are multiple violations of local, state, and federal election laws."

Evidence to support that very point was desperately needed about a year ago, and, as we all know, absolutely none of it appeared in the relevant courtroom. If you have any such material, by all means please produce it. (If you've had it since January 2005, you might wish to explain to Ms. Tebelius, Mr. Foreman, and Mr. Borders et. al. why you did not give it to them back then.)

Posted by: Paddy Mac on April 24, 2006 10:02 PM
26. I see that squid~for~brains as mis-applied Jim Miller's object from http://www.soundpolitics.com/archives/006086.html#006086.

Not surprising. He/she/it tries so hard to be relevant, and fails miserably each and every time. Whatta tool...

Posted by: alphabet soup on April 25, 2006 11:35 AM
27. "...there were 1100 more votes than voters, and as a consequence ... [Gov. Chris Gregoire] can never claim a legitimate election."

Mr. Rossi claimed victory by 261-- no, 42-- votes. Thank you for confirming the illegitimacy of his claim. Good to see that you agree with Judge Bridges, after all!

Posted by: Paddy Mac on April 25, 2006 09:48 PM
28. The one fact neither confirms nor denies anything except your abject stupidity whack......

Posted by: alphabet soup on April 26, 2006 01:03 PM
29. If Gov. Gregoire has no claim to legitimacy, based on her 129 -- no, 133 -- vote margin of vitory, then Dino Rossi's claims of victory had no legitimacy, either. We Seattle liberals are glad to see that Mr. Rossi's supporters recognize that fact.

Posted by: Paddy Mac on April 27, 2006 12:10 AM
30. It must be your obdurate Scot ancestry kicking in that causes you to behave so foolishly. Do you always go out of your way to not see a point? Or were you just kicked (repeatedly) in the head?

Posted by: alphabet soup on April 27, 2006 08:23 AM
31. "...there were 1100 more votes than voters, and as a consequence ... [Gov. Chris Gregoire] can never claim a legitimate election."

Either that statement is right, or it is wrong. If it is correct, then Mr. Rossi (all together, now!) "can never claim a legitimate election." If it is wrong-- as a Republican Secretary of State and a Republican Judge in a Republican county both agree-- then Gov. Gregoire may have a legitimate claim to her office.

This reminds me of the original lawsuit. Even if we had granted every last claim that the plaintiffs made, they would still have come nowhere close to satisfying the requirements of our laws.

Posted by: Paddy Mac on April 27, 2006 11:27 PM
32. OK, I'll say this slowly, because it's obvious that you're a mental defective.

With regards to the topic at hand, it matters not what formed the basis of Rossi's court claim - as you point out, the court rejected his claim. What remains is irrefutable - there was massive vote fraud/corruption and as a result the election was damaged beyond an intelligent determination.

The proper response was to invalidate the contest and do it over.

Judge Bridges said that, although he recognized the mess that had occurred, he did not have the appropriate authority to grant the relief that the Republicans asked for.

What remains is a legal determination to award the contest to fraudoire based on defective data, corrupt administrative manipulation, and woefully inadequate statutory law. You like it because (this time) it favors your position. Bully for you.

While I would have preferred Rossi to prevail, what I want more than that is a proper, legitimate election. It didn't happen last time, and unless dipshiites like you are hounded away from the fire, it is slated to happen again and again.

Posted by: alphabet soup on April 28, 2006 12:26 PM
33. "[...] What remains is irrefutable - there was massive vote fraud/corruption and as a result the election was damaged beyond an intelligent determination.
[...]
"Judge Bridges said that, although he recognized the mess that had occurred, he did not have the appropriate authority to grant the relief that the Republicans asked for."

Judge Bridges explicitly stated that the plaintiffs had not introduced any of evidence of fraud. He also stated that they had not produced evidence sufficient to justify his negating the election. He explained the errors made in King County as innocent of criminal intent. He described the plaintffs' logic as a fallacy. He completely and unequivocally rejected every claim that they made. And yet, SoundPolitics and its commenters still pretend that he said something else. Perhaps the Cult of Rossi's Victory should apply to the I.R.S. for status as a religion, since their beliefs have nothing to do with fact.

Posted by: Paddy Mac on April 28, 2006 11:00 PM
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