Monday, February 11, 2008

Sorry, Huck — It Looks Like McCain Won Washington State   [Byron York]

I just talked to some sources about the situation with the Washington State Republican caucuses. The Huckabee campaign is protesting the vote there, which shows John McCain as the winner by a narrow margin. Huckabee's accusation is that GOP officials in Washington State declared the race for McCain on Saturday night when they had counted just 87 percent of the vote, and quit counting votes after that. Counting all the votes, they said, might change the final result.

"They decided to just quit counting votes," Huckabee said on CNN this morning. "That's hardly the American way of conducting an election. So we got lawyers who flew out last night. We're going to demand a full accounting. We're going to see what happened and why the irregularities. It appears that arbitrarily, the party chairman just decided that he could see how it was going, even though only 200 votes separated John McCain and me. And they just simply quit counting votes with 87 percent of the vote in. That's completely outrageous. So, we're challenging that."

The story I get from officials in Washington is that they did not stop counting votes on Saturday – they stopped counting votes for the night. This is what happened:

The caucuses were held in about 750 locations across the state, incorporating about 6,000 individual precincts. It was up to officials at those locations to send the voting results in to state party headquarters. This was the first time the state GOP had attempted same-day reporting of results; usually it took days to count the votes. Even now, the precincts have until February 16 to postmark the information to headquarters. Anyway, by about 10:30 p.m. Saturday, there were no more vote sub-totals coming in from all those remote locations to state headquarters. State officials had counted all the votes they had received, but many people out in the precincts had apparently called it a night without sending in results. So state officials announced what they had: with 87.2 percent of precincts reporting statewide, John McCain had 25.5 percent, and Huckabee had 23.7 percent. State chairman Luke Esser, a lawyer who also has a degree in accounting, declared McCain the winner.

On Sunday, more votes came in. Last night, the state posted an updated total: with 93.3 percent of precincts reporting, McCain led with 25.4 percent, and Huckabee had 23.8 percent. So the gap between the two men, which had been 1.8 percentage points on Saturday, had narrowed to 1.6 percent.

Today, state officials are receiving more results, and they hope to post them by 4:30 p.m. local time, 7:30 in the east. They tell me they do not expect the final result to change: it was close, but John McCain is the winner.

02/11 02:49 PMShare