[P class=rdheadline]Gregoire's election stands
[SPAN class=rddeckline]State Supreme Court throws out legal challenges by voters[/SPAN]
[P class=rdbyline]By [A href="mailto:
[email protected]"]GREGORY ROBERTS[/A]
P-I REPORTER
It's official: Christine Gregoire is still governor of the state.
The state Supreme Court Thursday dismissed four challenges to her November 2004 election, filed by voters apart from the litigation of the state Republican Party, which lost its case in a 2005 trial. That trial, in Chelan County Superior Court, declared that Gregoire, a Democrat, defeated GOP candidate Dino Rossi by 133 votes out of more than 2.8 million cast.
In its 7-2 decision, the Supreme Court dismissed the challenge by Suzanne Karr of Snohomish County on the grounds that it was essentially identical to the claim pursued by the GOP in the trial. The Republicans maintained that Gregoire won because of mistakes and errors by elections officials and the counting of illegal votes, mainly from felons. Although the trial judge agreed hundreds of illegal votes were tallied, he ruled that the Republicans did not clear the legal hurdle of proving Gregoire owed her victory to wrongful votes.
Justice Richard Sanders disagreed with the high court majority, arguing that Karr cited a different section of state law than the Republicans did. Justice James Johnson also dissented, but did not write an opinion.
In a second challenge rejected by the court, King County voter Arthur Coday Jr. claimed the election was not "free," as required by the state constitution, because the Democratic Party posted the $730,000 deposit to pay for the hand recount of the votes that gave Gregoire her victory. He also argued that it was statistically invalid to use only the final count to determine the election instead of averaging the three counts. He said elections officials wrongly added ballots for inclusion in each recount and illegally enhanced improperly marked ballots so they could be read by counting machines.
The court said the practices challenged by Coday are valid under state laws and regulations.
In his challenge, Daniel Stevens of King County maintained that the election should be thrown out because the difference in the vote totals for Rossi and Gregoire was within a statistical margin of error.
In the fourth unsuccessful challenge, Michael Goodall of King County said that while Gregoire was attorney general before her election as governor, she conspired with other public officials to cover up the abuse of Goodall's autistic son in foster care to shield the state from a large damage claim, thereby running afoul of a state law that bans vote-buying. The court said neither Stevens nor Goodall met the legal requirements for challenging an election.
