Now you're catching on. There are two bases in the law for contesting an election -- "illegal votes" (which the legislature has tried its best to make darn near impossible to prevail on) and "irregularity" or "neglect" (which doesn't require proof that the invalid votes were cast for one candidate or another).

It may be true that the court will require evidence showing for whom disqualified felons voted and for whom people who voted more than once by absentee ballot voted, but it wouldn't be consistent with statute or case law to require the same thing for the "mystery voterless ballots" that far outnumber the eligible voters who participated in the election.

If the evidence is sufficient to show that those invalid ballots were inserted into the vote counts through the neglect or misconduct of any election officials at either the precinct polling places or the counting centers, then they should justify setting aside the election if their number exceeds the apparent margin of victory.

Micajah--

What is the standard of perfection you are looking for? There cannot be more than 129 errors out of 2.8 million?!!

If these errors/irregularities occurred, how could they have happened except through "the neglect or misconduct of any election officials"? What would a totally innocent and forgiveable "irregularity" look like?

I am not denying that this was a pretty awful election, and I am nearly as disgusted as you are (Well, maybe not entirely). But we need more than disgust here--"I know a dirty election when I see one"; we need some benchmark, some articulable standard of "acceptable irregularities." When you say no "irregularities" greater than the margin of error are you not establishing a counsel of perfection impossible to meet? Where is this the achieved standard?

Perfection is not required, but mistakes by elections officials cannot result in the wrong person being elected. The premise of free elections is that the voters choose the winner. Should a mistake, innocent or intentional, result in the wrong person being named the winner, the other candidate has the right to prove in court that the mistakes resulted in the wrong person winning the election.

There is prior precedence that if the mistakes make it appear that the true winner is unknowable, then the election can be set aside.

I do not believe the showing of 130 ballots with problems attached (illegal voters or improper processing) is enough to set aside an election. As the judge said, it is a high bar to get over. However, it may be that 260 problem ballots is sufficient. I would think that 1,000 would be high enough.

Does this mean that we can't have a close election. No. However, it does mean that the closer the election, the better the administration needs to be.

Did you refer to it as a "victory" when Rossi was the one with an even smaller lead? Or did you not use those quotation marks when the Republican was "triumphant"?

I was thinking back on the 1912 case, which I read after the Ds cited the case in their brief. There are distinctions that can be drawn between then and now.

In that case, the court received evidence about whom some of the illegal votes voted for, but there were others that weren't identified. On one vote, the court rejected heresay evidence about whom the voter selected. Other voters selections were not identified.

The ruling came down to the point that the unidentified illegal votes were less than the margin of victory. None of the identified illegal votes were by felons, so the issue of less than trustworthy testimony was not an issue.

The heresay ruling could be important now in rejecting newspaper accounts of how felons voted.

To all - make sure you see http://tinyurl.com/6ojjh when you can because that's Marummy's latest roar.

(For the uninitiated, that's Mary Lane giving a press release as the policy director, "spokeswoman", State SecDef, blog outreach officer, communications director, and probably 4 more titles given either by the LSM or me, her #1 suck-up.)