Re-Recount in Washington State: Is the third time a charm?
Andy Rooney, 60 Minutes commentator and controversial essayist once said, “I feel much safer letting a machine with no political affiliation recount votes when needed. I know what the definition of lying is.” Rooney’s thoughts aside, in the Washington State gubernatorial race, some county machines were proven defective and a manual re-recount, like it or not, is the statutory remedy.
November 2nd was the tightest gubernatorial race in Washington State history with a difference of 42 votes between the Republican and Democratic candidates. Secretary of State Sam Reed certified with experts around the nation and concluded that never before has there been an election race with such close results.
Elections have historically been 99.9% accurate in Washington until small errors were discovered during the recount procedure of the race between Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire and Republican candidate Dino Rossi. Gregoire decided that less than 0.0015%, the percent difference in votes, is not enough to call her gubernatorial race a defeat after twenty years of the Democratic Party holding the state.
So after the Democratic Party raised the more than $700,000 required by the state one day short of a month after the original vote, they reached their goal of starting a statewide manual re-recount of the 2.8 million votes cast for governor. The Democratic Party asked the state Supreme Court to consider previously uncounted ballots and for all counties to treat ballots the same. This refers to provisional and absentee votes, which were discarded by some counties. Each vote will cost an estimated 25 cents to be counted and the outcome will be announced some time after Christmas.
Gregoire has thus far refused to concede to Rossi, who won by 261 votes in the first count and 42 votes in the second. Gregoire calls the recount a tie, while Rossi was named governor-elect by media standards and has been voicing his outrage on NPR and local morning shows. Washington papers from the Seattle Times to the News Tribune in Tacoma are declaring Rossi’s victory.
Since the election in 2000, the public has known about machines’ inaccuracies, such as votes left unregistered or even a machine that casts a vote for the wrong candidate. When thinking back to crucial recounts, Palm Beach County, Florida comes to mind. The showdown between Bush and Gore got every politically charged and potentially disenfranchised American insisting on a recount, and a viable one.
The two candidates now brace for a second recount, with the votes being counted by hand, and the winner will be decided by inauguration day in January. Governor Gary Locke will remain in his position until the new governor is rightfully determined. In case of a tie, the deciding vote would be cast by the Legislature.
The political fall-out for both sides is clear. There has not been a Republican governor in Washington State since John Spellman in 1980, so this would be an all-important win for the Republicans. As for the Democrats, Gregoire was considered the ideal candidate after Locke, and Democrats urged her not to give into erroneous findings by the count and recount. Before Election Day, pundits expected her to win by a landslide.
But this may not be just a matter of voting irregularity; it may be voter fraud, in my opinion. Not only does this increase my lack of confidence in state systems, but begs the question that voting machines possibly have too much of the public’s trust and not enough of our skepticism. Machines are just as imperfect as human beings, because man is responsible for making machines. Trusting the manufacturer of the voting machine is like a political party candidate trusting the opposition. When irregularities force multiple recounts and reveal varying outcomes, its time to take a closer look. Whether the manufacturers of voting machines carry partisanships or the machinery was tampered with is not the question. The question is why should the American public continue to trust their vote to these machines? Voter fraud is being cried out from the roof tops when a recount requires a re-recount.
Furthermore, in Washington, humans may be better at correcting voter errors than a piece of metal, no matter how unemotional or unbiased. The reason that Washington State called for a statewide re-recount is possibly for ballot interpretation – defects or general flaws in the machine’s reading of a voter’s chad. This problem routinely resurfaces when error rates for the machines produce any significant net change. According to researchers, hand counts are as precise as lever machines and optical scanners, and considerably more exact than electronic systems and the punch card. It seems it is time to take matters into our own hands, this time literally.
Conversely, Harvard Law Professor Einer Elhauge wrote in Hoover Institution’s Policy Review on the problematic and subjectively biased nature of manual recounts. Voting machines do not err with political preferences or human-created ambiguity. According to Elhauge, manual recounts should be limited because a problem prevails with using humans to count ballots. Machine counting exists not just to save costs and speed the process, but to reduce fraud and routine human error in ballot counting.
But machines cannot interpret the intent of a voter. A manual recount is called when there is an error in the vote tabulation or when the tabulation system fails to properly count a marked or punched ballot. This error could result from the software of the voting system itself.
When voting is responsible for compiling and compressing the opinions of millions of people, and technology proves to be inept, there is cause for controversy. Voting is a process of social comparison as well as consensus. The public must form a mutual agreement for their collective opinion to influence institutions of decision-making. In this case, the voting outcome caused controversy by the public who disagrees and feels under-represented.
It is time for legislative bodies nationwide to examine ways of improving mechanisms and machinery for voting. Enough with the recounts--America should be technologically advanced enough to get it right the first time.
So, Rooney, what happens when machines are to blame - when they are defective, fraudulent pieces of junk leading to a re-recount? When Washington Democrats have to pay out of their pockets for a manual count of votes because machines are cheating them out of their right to a fair election? No longer do Washington voters “feel much safer letting a machine” do the counting. They too know what the definition of lying is.
You can reach Dana Lerner at drl250@nyu.edu
