The Washington State Democratic Party announced today that they will fund a statewide, hand recount that will likely go to Christmas, if not beyond. This is unfortunate, and marks another instance in a troubling pattern of Democrats refusing to accept election results when they don't go their way, a pattern which began with the Florida recount of 2000.
As we in the Evergreen State head into our third recount, the likelihood of voter fraud and ballot tampering only increases. It's a well-known fact that the more a ballot is handled, the more weathered it becomes, and as a result, the less reliable it becomes. With hand recounts you also introduce the inevitability of human error, which greatly lessens the validity of the outcome, a point the Democratic head of elections in King County has pointed out.
Even if the results are changed, and Attorney-General Gregoire becomes governor, her ability to govern will be greatly diminished by how she came to office, a fact that seems to be lost on her and state Democrats. Though Dino Rossi has only won by 42 votes, it should be mentioned that elections workers in the heavily Democratic King County engaged in the dubious but all to familiar practice of determining "voter intent" on ballots the machine tabulators rejected, a practice which was not applied in any other county and which undboubtedly gave Mrs. Gregoire more votes than she really deserved. Despite all the efforts by Democrats and Democratic sympathizers to swing the election to Mrs. Gregoire, Dino Rossi has still won the governorship, and Democrats and the Gregoire campaign should do what is best for the state and concede the fact. Instead of being the party of the common man, which they have always claimed to be, the Democrats have become the party of litigation and sore losing.
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