Governor’s Race

Most of you have probably begun to put electoral anxiety in the rear view mirror, embracing all kinds of other forms of anxiety instead. Here in Washington, it won’t end. I’ve been following the vote count in the Rossi/Gregoire race several times a day. It really can’t get any closer–with one day and about 6,000 votes left to come in tomorrow, Rossi is leading by a whopping 19 votes. If any of you live in but didn’t vote in Washington, I hope you were a child, felon, or Canadian.

It looks pretty good for Rossi, as the county-breakdown of the remaining ballots clearly look good for him (here’s where they’re supposedly coming from). If counties continue on their current path, stealth wingnut Rossi will win by about 600 votes. However, not-so-stealth wingnut Stefan Sharkansky has some theory about some King county votes going stronger for Gregoire on the last day–these are the “affidavit votes.” Here’s the explanation for this theory from a GOP election observer :

King County expects to tabulate around 1450 ballots tomorrow. Included in this number are the 600+ affidavit ballots, of which we can assume an overwhelming proportion will be for Gregoire. (However, a surprising number of provisional ballots have been straight Democrat, with the exception of the governor’s race. In addition, many provisional voters failed to vote for governor. I do not expect that all 600+ ballots will be for Gregoire.) Of the remaining 800 or so ballots, our survey ran as follows:

Rossi: 127, or 36%
Gregoire: 190, or 54%
Other: 33, or 9%

Head to head, Rossi’s share is 40% to Gregoire’s 60%.

So of the remaining 1450 (?) ballots from King County, I speculate that Gregoire will capture 1000 votes, and Rossi will capture 300. I hope I am wrong.

The punchline is that if Sharkansky’s affidavit theory is correct, Rossi’s projected victory shrinks to….36 votes. Which is basically a statistical tie going into the mandatory recount. Even if Sharkansky is way off base, we’re almost certainly going to have a recount, as we’d need one party to win the remaining votes by more than 2:1 to get us out of the 2,000 vote margain.

Anyway, the best blog coverage of the count is here at Sharkanky’s site. You have to ignore pretty much all the commentary (there’s lots of evidence free bouncing off the walls about how anything that benefits Gregoire is further objective proof the election is being stolen from Rossi), but he has good, constantly updated spreadsheets that rejigger the projections each time a county submits new numbers. For a non-wingnut blog that’s covering the election pretty well, see here. Their spreadsheet blogging isn’t as cool, but at least the commentary is sane.

The vote tallying and counting process here in Washington is absolutely baffling. I have so many questions no one can answer. Here’s one: in tiny Wahkiakum County, they’ve got an estimated five (5) votes left to count. They last updated their vote count with the Secretary of state on November 5th, at 11:33 AM. So my question is, what have they been doing in Wahkiakum County for the last 11 days? The mind boggles.