Power Line: Speaking of Washington State

January 23, 2005

Speaking of Washington State

The campaign for clean elections led by Sound Politics is gaining steam. The fact that Democratic officials allowed widespread voter fraud has become too obvious for the mainstream media to ignore. Pull On Superman's Cape has a shot of this morning's Seattle Times:

The Times article is here. Jim Miller writes on Sound Politics:

Did Illegal Votes From Felons Provide Gregoire's 129 Vote Margin?
That's what I have thought ever since the manual recount in our governor's race. As Stefan Sharkansky noted in this post, the Seattle Times has done a partial search of the records in just two counties, King and Pierce, and found that dozens of felons voted.

Let me emphasize just how partial; the two counties are the largest in Washington state, but have less than half the state's population between them. (Though they may have more than half of the felons.) The search relied on exact matches of names, something that will miss felons who change their names even slightly. The searches in the two counties went back only to, at most, 1997 and did not include 2004 court cases. The searches would not detect felons who had committed felonies in other states, and then moved to Washington. (Those felons can vote here only if their rights have been restored in the state in which the felony was committed.)

Given the number of illegal votes that this partial search found, I think the guesstimate in this post looks quite reasonable. I still don't think Gregoire gained 1,000 votes, net, from felons voting illegally, but I am nearly certain that she gained more than 129 votes, net, that way.

And, of course, illegal voting by felons was only one of many frauds in the Washington election. It's great to see the Seattle Times finally taking an interest in the fraud, but it's also important to remember that this is happening only because of the work done by Stefan Sharkansky and his colleagues at Sound Politics. If it hadn't been for the bloggers, the massive fraud that swung the election to the Democratic candidate would never have come to light; and even with the bloggers' efforts, the fraud will most likely not be overturned.

Still, the Washington fiasco may help to focus attention on the ubiquitous problem of voter fraud before it is too late. I know of no reason to think that fraud is any easier to commit in Washington than in most other states. This paragraph from the Seattle Times article sums up the situation succinctly:

Election officials in King and Pierce counties say voter-registration procedures are designed to make it easy for people to vote. Instead of employing a rigorous screening process, they rely on people to be honest when registering or voting.

That's why it's harder to buy a six-pack of beer than to commit voter fraud.

Posted by John at 08:04 PM |

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