WA GOP: looking for a few activist judges

George Howland gives us the run-down on the Washington governor's race imbroglio and what it could mean for statehouse elections, nation-wide.

Even if Gregoire rebounds in terms of public opinion, the impact of the GOP’s killer combo of a crack p.r. campaign and an enduring legal challenge is not lost on political professionals around the country. Strategic Vision’s CEO David Johnson, a national Republican political consultant in Atlanta, says, “The political class, consultants -- everybody is taking a look at it.” Mark Mellman, a national Democratic consultant from Washington, DC, who worked for Gregoire in 2004, agrees: “There’s no question that not only the consultants but also the parties are looking at this case. It could well encourage many future challenges in many future close elections.”

The system of election administration in our country has a margin of error. Political professionals know this and are already using it to calculate whether an election is beyond “the margin of litigation,” as conservative writer John Fund has put it. Professor Rick Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola University Law School, notes that the number of election challenges has already climbed in the wake of Bush v. Gore, from 62 cases in 1998 to 250 cases in 2002. He says the lesson that political professionals have learned is that it is OK to challenge close elections. “There is much less concern about damage to the democratic process and more concern about who won.”

A Rossi court victory could open the floodgates to election challenges around the country. An increase in challenges would make the peaceful transition between office holders more contentious and difficult and would fuel the bitterness of both the grassroots and the elected officials. That bitterness, in turn, would feed into the governing process, making elected officials of both parties less likely to cooperate across party lines to pursue sensible legislation that represents the public interest.

Amazing how quickly Republicans turn to the courts when they're on the losing side of elections. But you knew that.

One thing that hasn't come up with this, though, that I'd be interested in hearing more about. The GOP is basing their case on statistical analysis of voting patterns. Doesn't this sound suspiciously like the statistical analysis Republicans opposed prior to the 2000 U.S. census? Like most things, this is way out of the "sweet spot" of any expertise I may have, but I sure would like to understand that aspect of this a whole lot better.