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2004 Washington gubernatorial election

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The 2004 Washington gubernatorial election is the election for governor of the U.S. state of Washington, in the year 2004. The primary election was held on September 14, 2004, and the general election was held on November 2, 2004.

On December 30, 2004, Christine Gregoire was declared the victor of a third, manual recount, partially delayed by a court order preventing King County from including over 700 ballots that county officials say were improperly rejected. The election has been plagued with increasingly close margins of victory (it has been the closest race in Washington state history). Although Gregoire was sworn in as Governor of Washington on January 12, 2005, her opponent Dino Rossi has not formally conceded and is calling for a re-vote due to concerns about the integrity of the election. He has commenced legal action to challenge the result.

Democratic primary

In July 2003, incumbent state governor Gary Locke indicated he would not seek a third term. This opened up the Democratic primary to alternate candidates.

Former Washington Supreme Court justice Phil Talmadge was the first candidate to enter the race, challenging Gary Locke before he announced his retirement, but Washington Attorney General Christine Gregoire quickly became the frontrunner, leading in fundraising and endorsements. King County Executive Ron Sims also failed to catch on, perhaps due to his association with the controversial Sound Transit light rail project. According to a March 2004 Mellman Group poll, Gregoire would beat Sims and Talmadge 36% to 11% to 4% in an open primary, and would beat Sims 55% to 17% in a closed primary. [1] On April 29, 2004, Talmadge announced he was withdrawing from the race following the discovery of a benign kidney tumor (angiomyolipoma), citing the likely need for surgery and associated recovery time. As it turned out, Gregoire beat Sims 66% to 30%.

Candidates


Withdrawn candidates

Declined to run

Results

Candidate Votes
Christine Gregoire 504,018 65.62%
Ron Sims 228,306 29.72%
Mike The Mover 15,118 1.96%
Don Hansler 8,636 1.12%
Scott Headland 6,983 0.90%
Eugen Buculei 5,005 0.65%
certified, 10/5/2004

Republican primary

The state GOP struggled to find a candidate through most of 2003 before finally recruiting Dino Rossi, a relatively obscure political figure who left the state Senate to pursue a gubernatorial run. (State elected officials are prohibited from raising money while the legislature is in session.)

Candidates

Withdrawn candidates

Declined to run

Results

Candidate Votes
Dino Rossi 444,337 85.14%
Bill Meyer 44,448 8.51%
John W. Aiken, Jr. 33,104 6.34%
certified, 10/5/2004

Libertarian primary

The state Libertarian Party race was between Ruth Bennett, former state chair of the party in Washington and Colorado, and Michael Nelson.

Candidates

Results

Candidate Votes
Ruth Bennett 7,382 56.48%
Michael Nelson 5,687 43.51%
certified, 10/5/2004

General election

Initial results

Gregoire led in almost all polls conducted leading up to the election, but Rossi was able to close in on her late in the race and won considerable support from Eastern Washington. He also ran much stronger than expected in Snohomish and Pierce Counties. Gregoire received strong support from the largest county in the state, heavily Democratic King County, where she outpolled Rossi by nearly 3 to 2. During the count the lead changed hands several times.

Absentee ballots

Washington is unusual for a U.S. state in that it only requires that an absentee ballot be postmarked by the day of the election to be valid, while most other states require the ballot to have arrived at the election office by that time. Due to this as well as the state's high number of absentee ballots (more than 60% of all King County voters were absentee), the initial result of the election was not known until November 17, the last day under state law for election results to be certified by each county's election officials.

One point of controversy has been signatures on provisional and absentee ballots. In many eastern Washington counties, the county election offices have been providing to the political parties the names of people whose absentee and provisional ballots have been ruled invalid due to issues with missing or non-matching signatures. The Republican Party began calling these voters to inform them their ballot was invalid and to give them information on how to contact the election offices to get their ballots validated. The Democratic Party sought the same list from heavily Democratic King County but were rebuffed. The party sued, and on November 12 a King County judged ruled that the county election board would have to turn over the list of 936 voters with invalid ballots due to signature to all parties with candidates in the race. While the Democratic party canvassed these residences November 13 through 16, the GOP began sending vans into the rural counties to drive voters with invalid ballots to election offices.

Another state law allows for election officials to evaluate voter intent and manipulate ballots so that the machines can count the votes. Republicans filed a federal lawsuit to stop the manual manipulation of ballots, as that is not allowed per federal law. This lawsuit was not successful, given that state laws govern the election process within a state.

First results and recounts

On November 17, the first count concluded and Secretary of State Sam Reed reported that Rossi held a lead of 261 votes. This was well within the margin (less than 1/2 of one percent and less than 2,000 votes) which requires a full machine recount. The statewide recount results completed November 24 showed Rossi with a lead of 42 over Gregoire. Of the 39 counties in Washington state, Rossi carried 32 and Gregoire 7. While Gregoire received less than 60% of the vote in Democratically strong King County, the county is large enough to overcome the votes of many other counties.

In Washington, a candidate may request as many as two manual recounts provided that they pay for the cost of each recount up front. If a manual recount overturns the outcome of an election, the state then refunds the money to the candidate. With Gregoire disputing the result, the Washington State Democratic Party lodged a check for $730,000 with Secretary of State Reed on December 3, and Reed issued the recount order on Monday, December 6. The state GOP had also indicated before the machine recount that they would seek a manual recount if the outcome in favor of Rossi was reversed.

Discovered ballots

On Sunday, December 12, King County Council chairman Larry Phillips was at a Democratic Party office in Seattle reviewing a list of voters whose absentee votes had been rejected due to signature problems, when to his surprise he found his own name listed. Feeling certain that he had filled out and signed his ballot correctly, Phillips asked county election officials to investigate. They discovered that Phillips's signature had somehow not been scanned into the election computer system after he filed to vote absentee. Apparently, when election workers received Phillips's absentee ballot in the mail and could not find his signature in the computer to compare to the one on the ballot envelope, they mistakenly discarded the ballot instead of checking it against the signature on Phillips's voter registration card on file, per standard operating procedure. The discovery prompted King Country Director of Elections Dean Logan to order his staff to search the computers to see if any other ballots had been wrongly rejected like Phillips's.

On December 13, Logan announced that 561 absentee ballots in the county had been wrongly rejected due to administrative error. The next day, workers retrieving voting machines from precinct storage found an additional 22 ballots, bringing the total to 573 newly discovered ballots. Logan admitted the lost ballots were an oversight on the part of his deparment, and insisted on seeing that the found ballots were counted. On December 15, the King County Canvassing Board voted 2-1 in favor of counting the discovered ballots.

Upon examination of the discovered ballots, it was discovered that, with the exception of two ballots, none of the ballots had been cast by voters whose last names began with A, B, or C. A search for more ballots was made, and on December 17, county workers discovered a tray in a warehouse with an additional 150 previously uncounted ballots. All together, 723 uncounted and improperly rejected ballots from King County have been discovered since the start of the manual hand recount.

State Republicans, calling the ballots "suspicious," filed suit to have a restraining order put on counting of the ballots. The request was granted on December 17, but Democrats appealed, leading to a state Supreme Court hearing on December 22. As the early results of the manual recount only showed a single-digit change in the already narrow margin, it was clear that inclusion of the discovered ballots could easily affect the election outcome.

After all other counties had submitted their recount votes, it was revealed on December 20 that at least five other counties besides King had included ballots that had been discovered after the initial tally. Snohomish County included 224 missed ballots which had been discovered underneath mail trays. The outcome of the Supreme Court hearing regarding King County's votes could have potentially affected those counties' counts as well.

While a recount in Washington had never overturned an election, no state election had ever been this close.

Opposition and advocacy

The state Republican Party regarded the news cynically, with chairman Chris Vance saying that he was "absolutely convinced that King County is trying to steal this election." On December 14, the National Rifle Association sent a mass e-mail to its members asking for volunteers to go to King County to sit in the county elections office and observe the recount. The NRA has endorsed Rossi.

Protesters gathered in front of both Democratic state headquarters and Republican state headquarters in the days after the injunction against King County's discovered ballots. Republican protestors in front of Washington's Supreme Court on December 21 dressed in orange and held signs saying "Welcome to Ukraine", comparing the counting of the discovered ballots to the election fraud in the recent Ukrainian presidential election.[2] Protest websites appeared for both sides of the dispute: "Accidental Governor" [3] and "How Gregoire The Grinch Stole Christmas" [4].

Manual recount results

On December 21, the state Democratic party claimed that, without consideration of the 700 discovered ballots which were not counted due to an injunction, the result of the manual recount including King County's votes placed Gregoire ahead by 8 votes across the state. Later on December 22, the county's preliminary recount results put Gregoire a 10 vote lead.

On December 22, the Washington State Supreme Court ruled that under state law, counties explicitly have the ability to correct ballot consideration errors made during earlier counts. The next day, King County's final tally, including those disputed ballots, gave Gregoire a 130 vote lead. (This was later revised to 129 when it was discovered Thurston County had added a vote after certificiation had been completed.) Since the recount results were in the favor of the party requesting the recount, the Democrats will be reimbursed the recount filing cost.

Before the final tally was announced, Republicans were already preparing further legal action regarding the recount results, and canvassing Republican voters whose ballots were rejected. On December 29, Rossi called for a re-vote, saying that "this election has been a total mess" and "a revote would be the best solution for the people of our state and would give us a legitimate governorship." This has been rejected by the Democrats and by Secretary of State Reed, leaving a lawsuit the only likely remedy for the Republicans. On December 30, Secretary Reed officially certified the results of the manual recount, declaring Gregoire the governor-elect.

Supporters of the Washington Republican Party have drawn attention to the discrepancy between the list of voters casting ballots (895,660) and the number of ballots reported in the hand recount (899,199) in King County; election officials have said that they have yet to finalize the list (which they anticipate will tighten the gap), and that discrepancies in these numbers are common and do not necessarily indicate fraud. By law, the result of the election can be contested by any individual who files suit at any time up to 10 days after the new Governor is inaugurated on January 12, 2005, which would be January 22. There are four possible outcomes of such a case: the election could be upheld; the court could declare Rossi the proper victor; the court could order the election rerun, or the court could order the election determined by the Washington State legislature.

On January 6, two challenges were filed by private citizens: Daniel P. Stevens of Fall City and Arthur Coday Jr. of Shoreline. The next day, the state Republican Party filed suit in Chelan County claiming that voters were deprived of their right to a "free and fair election" and asking for a revote. However, the suit does not ask that Gregoire's inauguration be delayed, thereby allowing current governor Gary Locke to leave his post as scheduled.

Results of initial count and recounts

Candidate Votes in initial count Votes in machine recount Votes in hand recount
Dino Rossi 1,371,414 48.876% 1,372,484 48.872% 1,373,232 48.868%
Christine Gregoire 1,371,153 48.867% 1,372,442 48.870% 1,373,361 48.873%
Ruth Bennett 63,346 2.258% 63,416 2.258% 63,465 2.259%
18:33 PST - 11/17/2004 14:00 PST - 11/24/2004 15:52 PST - 12/23/2004

Secretary of State's website

News

Candidates' Web sites

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