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February 11, 2008

Huckabee Dubious About WA GOP Vote Count

The Brad Blog is reporting on the "weird" GOP vote count in Washington State and Mike Huckabee's concerns that something untoward may have occurred to give the state's delegates to Sen. John McCain. Whether it did or not remains to be seen, but in the mean time, the Washington Republicans are providing the rest of us with some entertainment (albeit, entertainment of a somewhat dark and cynical nature).

It was 2:30am on the West Coast last night [Saturday] as we noticed CNN was reporting only 87% of precincts counted from Washington state's Republican Caucus yesterday. Just over 200 votes separated the leader John McCain from Mike Huckabee in a very close second, with Ron Paul coming in a very close third.

Throughout the day, according to Josh Marshall at TPM, Huckabee had been leading in the returns until very late, when McCain pulled just ahead of him by just a few votes.

"With 87% of the returns counted," writes Marshall, "the Washington state GOP, which runs the caucuses stopped releasing results. That left us and a lot of other news organizations in a bit of a quandary last night since it looked like McCain was going to pull it off. But as late as 1:30 AM on the east coast promised new results kept failing to materialize."

And then, in the middle of the night, the state GOP posted a press release declaring McCain the winner, even with some 13% of the votes still unreported, and just 242 votes --- out of 13,745 reported so far --- separating McCain from Huckabee who'd finished a "strong second" according to the GOP release.

"In other words," Huckabee campaign chair Ed Rollins says in their statement this morning [Sunday], "more than one in eight Evergreen State Republicans have been disenfranchised by the actions of their own party."

When 87% of the precincts had been counted, Washington Republicans had gone 23.7% for Huckabee, 25.5% for McCain, and a surprising (to me) 20.6% for Ron Paul. That's pretty close. Having spent many an election night watching the returns come in and the outcome change throughout the night, depending on which precincts were reporting, I'd say you shouldn't be calling a race that close when you still have 13% of the votes left to count. But someone did call the race:

Apparently, the head of WA state's Republican party just decided to stop counting votes from the GOP Caucus last night [Saturday] when he'd had enough and figured he could decide on his own who the winner would be. No need to waste more time and actually count the rest of the votes.

According to the Seattle Times' David Postman, state GOP Chair Luke Esser just made the call on his own, and claims today that he "would have done the exact same thing if Governor Huckabee had the same lead, and the same number of votes were outstanding."

Luke Esser explained himself thus:

“Maybe it would have been safer if I hadn't said anything. But it was an exciting and historic day for the state and I thought if I was confident about what the outcome would be I should share that with the people who had gone out to their caucuses.”

Esser finally told Huckabee's lawyer he would get around to counting the rest of the votes some time this week. But when the lawyer said the campaign would like someone to be present as the votes were counted, the brilliant Mr. Esser hung up on her.

Comically, Esser is pictured cheering enthusiastically in the background during the John McCain rally Friday night (the night before the election) in this Seattle Times article (background, far right). I don't really care who wins the race, but I do find it morbidly amusing when Republicans start acting like their characterization of Democrats.

Posted by Becky at February 11, 2008 10:57 AM