The Roanoke Times has an excellent editorial today about the Deeds-McDonnell Attorney General race recount scheduled for next week. The editorial's Orwellian title is "Virginia recounts without counting." That concisely sums up the idiotic ruling by a 3-judge panel that 500,000 scanner and punch-card ballots will be "retabulated," not actually "recounted." Apparently, as the Roanoke Times editorial notes, the judges felt that "fairly recounting all ballots in the attorney general's race [would be] too much trouble." Well, isn't that just wonderful? Yeah, let's make sure we don't inconvenience anyone, even if it risks getting a major statewide election wrong. Is that why they pay these judges the big bucks or what? Hmmm....OK, so here's the problem in a nutshell: optical scanners are notorious for not counting all votes, leading to many "undervotes" (i.e., when a voter colors outside the bubble). Downticket races are almost always undervoted, and in most elections it doesn't matter much. But in the Deeds-McDonnell race, with a few hundred votes separating the two candidates, it matters a great deal. In fact, with a substantial percentage of jurisdictions using scanners on paper ballots, it's very well possible that the election results could change with a true recount. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen thanks to these brilliant - could we even call them "activist?" - judges. Here's the Roanoke Times on this travesty:
Election officials next week will mostly just double-check their math, rerunning ballots only if the court finds something wrong with printouts from the initial tabulation.That is not much of a recount. Officials cannot find miscounted votes if they only make sure they carried the seven. No doubt the first tabulation had a minimal margin of error, but its closeness demands extra scrutiny the second time round.
The panel left Deeds the option of challenging ballots on a locality-by-locality basis. Things will get ugly if his campaign cherry picks localities with heavy Democratic registration for challenges.
No one wants this recount to degenerate into Florida's 2000 debacle with officials peering at hanging chads, but next week's recount goes too far in the opposite direction by removing nearly all chance for correcting mistakes.
In other words, the judges have thrown out the baby with the bathwater here. As a result, Virginians will never be sure who the REAL winner was of the 2005 Deeds-McDonnell race. And that should be unacceptable to everyone, Democrats and Republicans alike.