Dismissed with prejudice

Three pleasing words.

That’s how John Bridges, Chelan County Superior Court Judge presiding over the Republican electoral contest lawsuit over the 2004 Washington gubernatorial election, closed his decision in the case this morning.  What it means, of course, is that he ruled in favor of retaining the certified result of the election on the merits, that the GOP utterly failed to make any case whatsoever to support overturning the result.

As I posted in a comment on HorsesAss earlier,

It did my epidemiologic heart proud that the judge strongly dismissed the GOP “experts” as unscientific purveyors of unsound statistical methodology applied to an extremely biased dataset. A double-header of falsity, one might say. That he used the term ecological fallacy was sweeeet.

Judge Bridges actually went even farther than calling the GOP’s PhDs on their unethical and anti-empirical “analysis” ... he basically said that Professors Gill and Katz were so far removed from standard statistical theory and practice that they didn’t even qualify as “experts”! 

This had to do with the “Frye hearing”, in which it was decided whether the Republicans’ “proportional analysis” would be acceptable as a methodology for removing illegal votes from the candidates’ totals.  That so-called technique—better known as the aforementioned ecological fallacy—had been touted for weeks on end by the unsavory (un)Stefan (un)Sharkansky at his (un)SoundPolitics website (link omitted quite intentionally).  Bridges not only found the Republicans’ data manipulations to be baseless and unscientific, he twisted the knife a bit by stating that even if he’d found the method to be appropriate, it still wouldn’t have overturned the result.

In the end, Bridges determined that only five of the 2.8 million ballots had been shown to be illegally cast for a specific candidate.  He therefore adjusted the candidates’ totals to take that into account—removing one from the count for the third candidate (Libertarian Ruth Bennett) and the remaining four from Republican Dino Rossi.  After the millions of dollars spent on this frivolous lawsuit, not a single ballot had been shown to have been illegally cast for Christine Gregoire!

All of this sound-and-fury didn’t quite signify nothing, but it was mighty close to it.  As ruled by Judge Bridges, Gregoire’s margin actually increased, from 129 to 133 votes over Rossi. 

The Washington Supreme Court will quickly dispose of the GOP’s last legal avenue, and then we’ll finally put this PR attack on Gregoire, King County, County Executive Ron Sims, and the Democratic party of Washington (the real reason for the frivolous, baseless, never-a-chance-to-win lawsuit) behind us.

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