At least here in leftie land, Washington State, that is how the math works.
Friday it was announced that 55,000 dead or ineligible voters have been removed from the statewide voter database.
In Saturday’s Seattle Times it was also mentioned that the state is looking into almost another thousand people who are currently residing in various jails and prisons but are still registered to vote (at the end of the article, of course).
You may remember that Barely Governor Gregoire was handed the job after the last re-count allowed by law supposedly gave her 129 more votes than her better opponent, Dino Rossi. A judge, whom the Gregoire supporters claimed had a vicious right wing bent, ruled that there was insufficient evidence to prove felons, double registraions and dead people were to account for enough votes to break the 129 vote margin.
My ass.
If you missed the RNS coverage of the 2004 Washington State Governor’s Election Debacle, you can click here to get to the ‘Count Any Vote’ category, where the posts are contained. Some fo the archived posts are missing because the pre-2005 archives don’t want to play WordPress’ game, but you’ll get the general gist of the situation.
Due to updates that fit the category but aren’t “WSGED Related” you’ll want to scroll about 2/3 of the way down the page to see the last one, Part Dvadtsat Vosem (Part 29).
I believe the judge ruled that, while there was plenty of proof of a number of illegal votes (exceeding the margin of victory) as well as illegally counted votes (also exceeding the margin of victory), there was no way of proving who those votes were actually cast FOR, and thus no way, under current law, to void the election results.
The fair thing to do would have been to declare the election to be null and void and vote again, but the law has no provision for such a thing.
Inexplicably, the Legislature has, in the last two sessions, failed to address this issue. Yet another reason why I won’t vote for anyone with ‘incumbent’ next to their name.
Oh, I’ll also note that as the law currently stands, it’s almost impossible to successfully challenge an election, without getting affidavits from all the illegal votes stating whom they voted for (absent an obvious case of ballot box stuffing, of course.)