Florida 2000 and Washington 2004

Current Revision Level

Rev. 1.7   February 4, 2009.

Introduction

Today America is more polarized than it has been since the Civil War. Like that turbulent period in our history we have very nearly become two separate nations under the same flag--divided along political, spiritual, and ideological lines. One consequence of this is split votes. The year 2000 national election gave George W. Bush the presidency when he won the state of Florida with one of the smallest victory margins in U.S. history. With Florida he acquired enough electoral votes to win the presidency even though Al Gore held a statistically significant national majority. The outcome was controversial not only because of its narrow margin but because of the many irregularities in Florida's electoral process. Even before Election Day had concluded there were widespread reports of people being denied access to polling places, ballot counting problems, and unusually high levels of ballot spoilage. Florida officials were widely criticized for their handling of the election. In particular, Secretary of State Katherine Harris drew fire for her office's handling of the state felon list and central voting files, and the election certification process. Many also expressed concern over her role as a chairperson of the Bush Campaign in Florida (a role she did not recuse herself from until the day before the election) she had a clear conflict of interest. This in turn led to accusations by Far-Right¹ forums that Democrats were playing partisan games and standing in the way of "the will of the people". To this day many on the Left claim that the year 2000 election was stolen while many on the Right counter that this is nothing more than pettiness and poor sportsmanship.

But nature abhors a vacuum. It was only a matter of time until a Republican candidate was on the receiving end of such an affair. In 2004 the Washington State gubernatorial election left Republican Dino Rossi with a margin that was almost as small. With over 2.88 million ballots cast the Election Day tabulation and a legally mandated machine recount left Republican Dino Rossi with a final lead of only 42 votes. As in Florida, Democrats expressed concern about the small margins which were in turn deflected by the Rossi Campaign and Washington's Republicans. But unlike Florida in 2000, Washington state law grants each candidate the right to a manual recount if the funds can be raised. Gregoire exercised this right and was able to raise the needed funds. The manual recount left her with a margin of 129 votes giving her the certified victory.

The upset was doubly significant. Not only was the initial Rossi victory undermined. The largest contributor shift in margin was King County. Washington State has for some time been significantly segregated geopolitically. By region, the large majority of the state is rural and conservative but its population and economic base are concentrated in the Puget Sound corridor. King County, which includes the greater Seattle area and the state's largest county population by a considerable margin, dominates its political landscape. It is also heavily Democrat. Washington's rural communities have always resented the fact that their state and federal elected leaders are essentially chosen by a single predominately urban region they feel is far removed from their interests. Washington's previous governor, Democrat Gary Locke, also rode a King County majority to the governor's office. Locke, who grew up there and was a King County leader prior to his governorship, was passionately disliked by Washington's rural conservatives. With over twenty years of Democrat control of the governor's office, Rossi's initial lead left them believing that they had finally taken back their state. The fact that once again, King County dominated the manual recount and gave the victory to another Democrat added insult to injury.

To no one's surprise, the decision created widespread shock and outrage. The Washington State Republican Party (hereafter WSRP) and the Rossi campaign immediately launched their own barrage of legal challenges and demanded an investigation of what they claimed was a "fishy" election. Numerous allegations of incompetence, negligence, and even outright fraud were made. A few of these proved to be true, fanning the flames even more. Around the state public demonstrations were held including a large and particularly contentious one at the capital on the day Gregoire was sworn into office. At least one death threat was made against her (Ammons, 2005). Within days the issue had spread to syndicated Far-Right media outlets and across America, and Washington became the Right's Florida 2000. Partisan politics aside, the election did have irregularities and Republicans were right to demand that it be investigated. With victory margins as small as these many factors that would otherwise be negligible will determine outcomes.

The similarities between the Gregoire/Rossi runoff and the year 2000 Bush/Gore contest in Florida are striking. Did either election truly represent the will of voters? How important was inefficiency or negligence to both outcomes? Was fraud involved at any level? If so, can it be shown that either election as stolen? In practical terms, this boils down to 4 questions;

• Did either election give a statistically significant measurement of the majority vote?
• Are there irregularities in ballot counts and/or election records that are non-random and statistically significant?
• Is there reliable evidence of voter disenfranchisement?
• Is there reliable evidence of specific fraudulent activities or partisan negligence?

The key to these questions, if there is one, is statistical significance. Elections are ultimately data entry and measuring efforts. The preferences of voters are measured, results are gathered by county and precinct, checked against voter records, and counted manually and/or by machine. It's inevitable that this process will have some level of human or machine related error that will introduce dispersion (i.e. random "noise") into the results. If this dispersion is large enough it can drown out the signal being measured just as static can drown out a weak radio station broadcast. Discrepancies in vote tabulation come from many sources, none of which can be completely removed from any election. Among the most frequent culprits are the following;

• "Technology" errors that result directly or indirectly from hardware or software failures and usability problems with vote tabulating and counting machines.
• Votes from military voters who cast federal write-in ballots that have not yet been accounted for.
• Illegal felon voters remaining on voter lists due to record keeping or screening errors.
• Legal voters wrongly listed as felons due to record keeping or screening errors.
• Participants in the Address Confidentiality Program.
• Inactive voters who until November had not participated in a State election for some time and have not yet been reconciled with records of more recent voters (the State does not track everyone who has ever cast a vote at any time in the State's history).
• Domestic-violence victims in hiding (of which there are a significant number in Washington).
• Data-entry errors (which contrary to the strident protests of many are a statistical fact in any data gathering enterprise).
• Registered non-absentee voters who used provisional ballots rather then electronic or absentee ballots, but were counted with absentee ballots anyway and whose records to that effect have not yet been updated.
• Voters taken off of post-election registration lists after voting.

These can be loosely classified as equipment failure, human error, and record keeping error. Any or all can in some instances lead to error rates of up to 1 or 2 percent of all ballots cast even in a clean election. In the absence of a smoking gun, it's impossible to prove that any election has been improperly won or lost if the noise from these sources is larger than the resulting victory margin. A review of each election's history and the demographic, bureaucratic and technical factors that drove them will clarify many of these questions.

The Washington 2004 Gubernatorial Race