It must have been a bitter irony for state Republican chairman Luke
Esser to find himself spending much of this week defending his ability
to count votes properly. After all, ever since the 2004 governor’s race
recount drama, his party has made a sport of railing against
incompetent vote counters in King County. Now here Esser was, the day
after he’d declared John McCain the winner in the state Republican
caucuses, being called on the carpet by fellow Republican Ed Rollins,
the blunt chairman of the Mike Huckabee campaign.
Rollins was furious that Esser
apparently stopped counting
Republican caucus votes and declared victory for McCain on February 9
with only 87 percent of precincts reporting, 242 votes separating
McCain and Huckabee, and 1,500 votes still uncounted.
“This is about the failings of the Washington State Republican
Party,” Rollins wrote in a heated press release announcing that the
Huckabee campaign was sending lawyers to Washington to challenge
Esser’s methods. “It was Mr. Esser’s duty to oversee a fair vote-count
process. Washington Republicans know, from bitter experience in the
2004 gubernatorial election, the terrible results that can come from
bad ballot counting.”
By Tuesday, three days after the caucus, Esser had upped the
percentage of votes counted, but he still hadn’t counted all of
them—the tally on the Republican Party’s website was stalled at
96 percent of precincts reporting, a very less than perfect result from
a party that has demanded nothing less than perfection from the public
servants charged with counting this state’s votes in general
elections.
National political bloggers were laughing. A local blogger, David
Goldstein of
www.Horsesass.org, was getting a lot of
new
traffic on an old post he’d put up revealing a column Esser
wrote in 1986 for the University of Washington Daily, in which
Esser referred dismissively to voting rights, saying: “Many of the most
successful anti-deadbeat voter techniques (poll taxes, sound beatings,
etc.) that conservatives have used in the past have been outlawed by
busybody judges.” Dwight Pelz, the chair of the state Democrats,
jokingly offered to help Esser out: He said, via an e-mail leaked to
the Seattle Times, that he would be willing to put Esser in
touch with Republican nemesis Dean Logan, the former head of King
County Elections.
But Esser had a full schedule, talking with a lawyer for Huckabee’s
campaign on Monday and repeatedly explaining his math and methods to
reporters—explanations that included, by Tuesday, the admission
that Republicans in four counties had misreported their results to the
state party. It was all a rather big mess (or “miscommunication” as
Esser put it), but in the end it may not be all that meaningful.
The Republican caucus “vote” is not binding on the delegates who
have so far emerged from the process (of which McCain still has more
than Huckabee). These delegates can still change their minds at will,
and in any case only 18 of them will ultimately end up at the national
convention. Nineteen others will be chosen through the Republican
primary process on Tuesday, February 19.
Still, Huckabee was not placated. His
campaign demanded a full
recount. 
