Challenge Hangs Over Washington Governor

It hasn’t been much of a political honeymoon for Gov. Christine Gregoire.

In a normal political atmosphere, she would have been guaranteed time to convince voters that the 9.5-cent-a-gallon gasoline tax increase she pushed through the Legislature a few days ago was the right thing to do. Before being asked to cast their ballots again, voters might have seen the fruits of her plan to ease the Puget Sound region’s mind-boggling transportation problems.

But this isn’t a normal political world.

Since Washington voters went to the polls in November, Gregoire routinely has awakened to headlines about mishandled ballots, deceased voters and what the alternative Seattle Weekly recently called “the election that won’t die.”

Her erstwhile challenger, Republican Dino Rossi, is suing to get the election overturned. Many legal experts say that when his case goes to trial May 23, the Republicans have a shot at getting an unprecedented revote. The number of ballots that have come under question far exceeds Gregoire’s 129-vote margin of victory. If their race were a 100-yard dash, the distance between them at the finish line would be barely one-third of an inch.

The postelection fight has become what state Republican Chairman Chris Vance calls “the legal equivalent of Gettysburg.” Both parties have spent millions of dollars on legal challenges, and Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts, last year’s Democratic presidential nominee, is scheduled to fly here today to help raise money for Gregoire’s cause.

Through it all, however, even the governor’s detractors say she has remained remarkably focused.

In the just-ended legislative session, Gregoire managed to achieve most of her stated goals -- including passage of her $8.5-billion transportation plan. She has made nearly all of her major personnel appointments, and says she is confident of prevailing in the legal battle ahead.

“I cannot and, in fact, I refuse to get distracted by what is going on” in the legal case, Gregoire, 58, said in an interview in Tacoma. “My philosophy is, the only thing I can do is to be a good governor.”

Gregoire was sworn in January, just days after state elections officials certified her victory after a hand recount of all 2.9 million ballots. Before that, two machine recounts had given Rossi a 42-vote lead.

If a revote happens, said Gregoire, a former state attorney general, “I’ll deal with it. But frankly, I can’t see getting there.”

Plenty of election-law experts here agree with her. Washington courts have never ordered a statewide revote, they say, and Gregoire appears to have followed the recount provisions to a T.

Recent polls also suggest that Gregoire has prevailed in the court of public opinion: A majority of Washingtonians now opposes a revote, which Rossi says is the only fair way to settle the matter.

One dynamic in any future Gregoire-Rossi matchup, however, will have changed profoundly: Gregoire now has a record to run on.

Although Democrats say the governor has accomplished much in a short time, Republicans call her a thief, or “Gov. Fraudoire,” and say she has resorted to big-spending, tax-hiking Democratic ways.

“For good or for bad, she’ll be running as an incumbent,” said Stuart Elway, a pollster in Seattle. “Rossi’s campaign will be: ‘See, I told you nothing would change if she became governor, and nothing did. They just raised taxes again.’ He’ll run the same campaign, only this time with an exclamation mark.”

A spokeswoman for Rossi, a former state senator, called the election “a giant mess.”

“At this point,” Mary Lane said, “not even Christine Gregoire can continue to say with a straight face that ... anyone can know with certainty who won.”

It is also impossible to know, Elway said, whether in a revote the electorate would focus on the gas, tobacco and state estate tax increases passed under Gregoire or give the Democrat-controlled Legislature credit for tackling big problems.

Those include reconstruction of Seattle’s Alaskan Way viaduct, which was damaged in a 2000 earthquake, and replacement of the busy Highway 520 bridge over Lake Washington that connects Seattle with its eastern suburbs.

“Transportation is on top of the charts of issues that people want resolved,” Elway said. “So if the sense coming out of this session is: ‘We’re finally doing something about it,’ it could be a huge plus for her.

“But these projects have such a long lead time,” Elway said. “And in the meantime, people are not going to be happy about these new taxes.”

Gregoire plans to travel around the state in the coming days for a series of public bill signings -- where she will promote the passage of legislation that expanded health coverage for nearly 20,000 poor children, increased enrollment and tuition aid at public universities, and created a $1-billion fund for biomedical and agricultural research.

As a public speaker, political-watchers here said, Gregoire can come off as somewhat wooden and controlled, though she is routinely described as funny and warm in more personal settings.

“My frustration is, did people get to know me” during the November election, the governor said. “I don’t think they did.”

In that contest, Gregoire targeted issues in her TV ads without talking much about her life: She is the daughter of a single mother who said she fled an abusive relationship and raised her child while working as a short-order cook. The governor herself is the mother of two accomplished daughters, the wife of a Vietnam War veteran, a breast-cancer survivor and a three-term attorney general who helped lead the landmark tobacco litigation that brought tens of billions of dollars to the states.

Rossi, in contrast, ran an ad campaign that featured his children and described how he’d worked as a young man polishing floors at the Space Needle.

Since being sworn in, Gregoire said, she has received support from around the country.

“All I get is, ‘We are so proud of you, you are courageous, you are strong,’ ” she said, describing the letters and e-mails. “People somehow or another have seen what happened here as kind of the model” for the way disputed elections should be resolved.

But former U.S. Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) -- who was ousted in 2000 by Democrat Maria Cantwell in another bitterly close race -- recently blasted King County officials for having “the worst elections administration of any county in the United States of America.”

Ballots from King County, where Seattle is located, gave Gregoire her edge in the final recount. They have been the focus of charges that dead people, felons, ineligible provisional voters and others who should have been struck from the polls instead had votes cast for them.

Democrats have a different view, saying that problem ballots occur in nearly every statewide election, and that the real news is how well the bulk of the ballots were counted. State Democratic Party Chairman Paul Berendt called the 2004 vote “the most accurate election in state history.”

During a recent call-in television program, Gregoire told one state resident: “I really wish we could move on.”

Being governor, she said, is a 24/7 job. “I’m doing [now] what I would’ve done if I had won by a landslide,” she added.