Pierce County reported. Here is how the two-party votes fell:
| Absentee Ballots | Gregoire | Rossi | Rossi Percentage |
| Machine Recount | 145,199 | 157,704 | 52.064% |
| Manual Recount | 145,431 | 157,905 | 52.056% |
| Pickup in new ballots |
+232 | +201 | 46.42% |
| Expected breakdown of new ballots |
+208 | +225 | |
| Discrepancy | +24 | -24 |
The outcome in Pierce County is not quite the anomaly that Snohomish was, but is still a stretch to attribute as simply the correction of random mistakes.
An explanation from the vote counters is called for.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at December 17, 2004
01:47 PM | Email This
I've said it before and I'll say it again... pick a freakin' rationale!
Previously you said that the Democrats were more likely to spoil their ballots. Where you attributed this to stupidity, I attributed it to socio-economic factors and poorer neighborhoods having shodier equipment.
Now, you alleged "anomalies" every time a precinct county contradicts your theory that newly added ballots "should break to both candidates in the same proportions as in the previously counted absentee ballots." Your assertion here is based on arbitrary musings. People who vote by different methods may have higher correlations to certain parties. In other words, voting methods themselves may be an independant variable.
It seems that as Rossi's lead slips closer and closer to the true intent of WA voters you panic more, and more, creating shifting rationales (similar to Bush Administration's 27 Iraq War reason's). The problem for you is that (a) you consider every democratic reason for gregorie winning to be illigitmate a priori, (b) the more rationales you come up with the less any individual one should be believed, (c) your statistics are crap-- according to you Rossi should have won the first and second rounds by thousands of votes.
Posted by: Dude on December 17, 2004 02:06 PMother than that the only thing I'd add to my last commentary is a message to Republicans... you will lose this race, stop whinning, and get over it.
Posted by: Dude on December 17, 2004 02:10 PMI am merely pointing out anomalies, and asking for explanations, not attributing them to any specific cause. You can speculate all you want, and maybe your theory about poor neighborhoods and shoddy equipment is a valid explanation. But let's look at the facts and not just rant like you're doing.
Your theory would NOT explain the Snohomish anomaly, as all of the variation was in the mail-in ballots, not having anything to do with neighborhood polling place equipment (well, maybe it's the case that some people are so poor that they can't afford working pencils, or something)
Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on December 17, 2004 02:14 PMTranslation: You people didn't really think you could elect a governor in this state, did you? Don't you know that elections are the sole province of Democrats? Don't bother to vote, because we'll just take it away anyway.
Posted by: Joel on December 17, 2004 02:15 PMChanging "egregious incompetence or fraud"
to "eGregoirous incompetence or fraud"
Ok, carry on.
Posted by: Ferrous on December 17, 2004 02:44 PM