« Dr Assisted Suicide goes to the USSC | Main | Portland couple used in anti-gay AARP ad »

February 22, 2005

Wonk this way

With profuse apologies to Aerosmith.

Torrid Joe over at AlsoAlso has all the wonky goodness that's fit to print on the Washington Goobernatorial court hearings from February 4th in Chelan County. Joe has taken apart the transcripts. It's a two part series that you can view here (part I) and here (part 2).

Joe dissects the rulings from Judge Bridges and gives his take on what it all means.

After reading Joe's analysis...it looks to me like Rossi and the GOP (not to be confused with Josie and the Pussycats) are in more trouble that I thought. The Democrats indeed lost several of their motions. But those motions were about whether or not a trial could really happen. The threshold for actually prevailing in the contest appears to be much higher:

The sentence isn't even finished before Bridges brings up the standards for prevailment, rather than contest. Until this point, the judge has ruled strictly on whether enough evidence existed to hold a trial. Obviously without that ruling, the Rossi campaign is dead in the water, so they had every reason in the world to be happy about how things had gone so far. But they didn't even get to enjoy the period of the sentence, before the judge shifted rhetorical gears.

Out come sections 68.100 and 68.110, both of which deal specifically with illegal votes. Section 100 specifies that all illegal votes must be made into discovery, names of voters attached, three days before trial. But it's 110 that seems to be the entire case in a single, ridiculously tortured sentence: the election can't be set aside unless some number of votes for a candidate exist that can be shown aren't legitimately for that person, to the extent that the person is no longer the winner. (My sentence is a serious shortcut, and even that's incomprehensible). It now appears clear that Bridges will hold a pre-trial hearing on predominantly this section, and whether the Rossi team has to identify votes for Gregoire, actually and in numbers to overturn the count.

Bridges also talks about the Hill v Howell standard. Hill v Howell is a precedent case in Washington from 1912. In a nutshell, H v H says any ballot not identified as illegal must stand as legal.

That puts the onus on Rossi to come up with the legal voters AND who they voted for.

That's gives the GOP a very tough uphill climb.

Posted by Carla at February 22, 2005 04:35 PM