Monday, April 11, 2005

Washington Gubernatorial Update V?

Our last update on this was two months ago but the case has progressed in the meantime...

The trial is due to start on May 23 and more irregularities have been found. John Fund has been following this faithfully for OpinionJournal - click title of his update.

Despite the glaring election process issues Democrats appear to have little interest in changing an awful procedure thanks to the conventional wisdom that higher turnout of any variety benefits them:

You'd think the Democratic Legislature would be appalled at the rampant mistakes and move to fix them. Indeed, separate election reform packages passed by both the House and Senate contain such good ideas as changing the appearance of provisional ballots so they aren't as easily mixed in with regular ballots. But both chambers also want to expand the state's already generous use of mail-in ballots, the system that directly led to so many mishaps last November. The state House passed a bill that would mandate that every election be conducted with only mail-in ballots, as Oregon does now.

What's more, the state's current widespread use of mail-in ballots provided an excuse for Kathy Haigh, chairman of the House committee overseeing election laws, to strip the election reform bill of a requirement that voters show photo ID at the polls. "Sixty-eight percent of the people are voting by mail," she explained. "When do they have to show ID? They don't, they have to sign." Precisely, which is a reason that expanding mail-in elections would only increase the potential for fraud.

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