Real Election Reform

*sigh*

1. It wasn't a fiasco. The recount worked as it should. The most secure and foolproof way of counting is having counters from each party counting every single ballot, and that's what they did.

2. There is no Democratic machine in Seattle. There doesn't need to be since the city is populated chiefly by Democrats. The usual criticism of Seattle politics is that they bend over backwards for fair process at the expense of timely responses to problems.

3. The elections board didn't lose ballots, with or without sneerquotes. About 700 absentee ballots were incorrectly rejected because of not having scanned signature images on file, or slight variations between the live signature and the scanned signature. As it happened, Gregoire would have won the hand recount with or without them.

4. Even Rossi isn't alleging 3500 ballots more than cast. In their suit, they're alleging 1217 in King County and 1979 statewide. If you read past the headlines, you'd see that this is the result of provisional ballots not appearing on the initial total of votes cast, that were included in the final results. This happens in every election and is no indication of fraud.

5. There is no provision at all for a revote. That would be making up a procedure because you don't like the result.

6. There are a lot of news accounts in the Seattle PI (center-left (center-right coverage) at

There's an interesting report of the recount told first-person by one of the people who worked on the recount at

-- Patrick