Washington state has a governor, but the Republican Party is trying everything it can to change that. Moderate Democrat Christine Gregoire was sworn into office on January 12, 2005, after winning the third and final recount over conservative Republican Dino Rossi by a mere 129 votes out of over 2.7 million cast. Unwilling to accept that result, Rossi and the Republicans chose to challenge Gregoire's election in court and have hammered at her legitimacy ever since. It all may finally be resolved by a trial beginning today in the small city of Wenatchee, in eastern Washington.
There is more at stake here than whether the Evergreen State is run by the equivalent of John Kerry or George W. Bush (which matters a lot to us in the upper-left corner). If Rossi wins his case, political professionals will see a successful strategy for contesting the results of statewide races and judicial standards for overturning an election will have been dramatically lowered. The combination of the two would mean more legal election challenges and an ugly new politics of undermining elected officials.
First, though, Dino Rossi has to win. The GOP's legal case looks pretty weak: They are depending on a legally untested and highly speculative method of statistical analysis that they say shows that Gregoire received more illegal votes than Rossi. Republicans can't document actual instances of fraud, but they can make the unfalsifiable claim that enough illegal votes may have been cast for Gregoire to flip the election. Under such close scrutiny, mistakes can always be found; last week's depositions revealed that King County elections officials failed to follow certain auditing standards, a development that could have serious implications. Rossi may yet win his bid to overturn Gregoire's election by judicial fiat, either winning outright installation in office or forcing a new election for governor.
In the meantime, however, the GOP has run a tremendously effective p.r. campaign to label the new governor “Fraudoire.” The Republicans' vast echo chamber -- including shock jocks of talk radio, fervent Internet bloggers, and Republican elected officials -- have skillfully used the imperfections of the state's electoral system to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Gregoire's election. Since the GOP's legal fact-finding process began, there have been new revelations about illegal votes on a regular basis. With each new batch of dead voters (currently 53) or illegal felon voters (currently 1,622), the mainstream press does the GOP's p.r. work for them. Even though the election system has held up remarkably well under this legal microscope -- there are no credible allegations of ballot-box stuffing and the number of illegal votes is only .07 percent -- Republicans have done a terrific job of making the public feel otherwise. The ground is fertile enough that last week's minor revelation seems to many like a smoking gun.
Public opinion polls show Washington has not accepted Gregoire's victory, and it's not entirely clear whether time is on her side. In order to fund much-needed investments in education, social services, and transportation, she reestablished the state's estate tax and raised gas and sin taxes during the recently completed legislative session. Since the state is in the midst of a six-year-long tax revolt, run by initiative and fueled by populist anger, Gregoire may have made herself more unpopular by raising taxes. According to public opinion polling by Survey USA, a nonpartisan firm that works for TV stations, Gregoire's May approval ratings (34 percent approve; 58 percent disapprove) are the lowest of any Democratic governor in the nation and forty-seventh overall. Those results are mirrored in other statewide opinion polls.
Even if Gregoire rebounds in terms of public opinion, the impact of the GOP's killer combo of a crack p.r. campaign and an enduring legal challenge is not lost on political professionals around the country. Strategic Vision's CEO David Johnson, a national Republican political consultant in Atlanta, says, “The political class, consultants -- everybody is taking a look at it.” Mark Mellman, a national Democratic consultant from Washington, DC, who worked for Gregoire in 2004, agrees: “There's no question that not only the consultants but also the parties are looking at this case. It could well encourage many future challenges in many future close elections.”
The system of election administration in our country has a margin of error. Political professionals know this and are already using it to calculate whether an election is beyond “the margin of litigation,” as conservative writer John Fund has put it. Professor Rick Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola University Law School, notes that the number of election challenges has already climbed in the wake of Bush v. Gore, from 62 cases in 1998 to 250 cases in 2002. He says the lesson that political professionals have learned is that it is OK to challenge close elections. “There is much less concern about damage to the democratic process and more concern about who won.”
A Rossi court victory could open the floodgates to election challenges around the country. An increase in challenges would make the peaceful transition between office holders more contentious and difficult and would fuel the bitterness of both the grassroots and the elected officials. That bitterness, in turn, would feed into the governing process, making elected officials of both parties less likely to cooperate across party lines to pursue sensible legislation that represents the public interest.
Developments in a courtroom in a small Washington city may determine whether our political process becomes even more degraded than it already is. Keep your eye on Wenatchee.
George Howland Jr. is the political editor of Seattle Weekly.
