In a race that’s been marked by GOPers noisily competing to claim the mantle of Reaganism, Mike Huckabee seized an easy opportunity on CNN this morning to resurrect the old foe: “That is not what we do in American elections… Maybe that’s how they used to conduct it in the old Soviet Union, but you don’t just throw people’s votes out and say, ‘well, we’re not going to bother counting them because we kind of think we know where this was going.’”
Well, the Washington state GOP chair Luke Esser was successfully bullied into finishing the state’s count earlier than he’d planned — and finally getting “as close as we can” to counting 100% of the vote.
That accelerated rate has put the GOP closer to that goal — now it’s at 93%, up from 87% when Esser decided to call it quits Saturday night. But assuming that they eventually get there, the counting is sure to get plenty of scrutiny. And given that this was a caucus with only about 13,500 Republicans turning out (with a couple hundred votes the difference between Huckabee and McCain), what would be otherwise minor charges of disenfranchisement take on greater importance. The Huckabee camp is already citing reports of supporters getting elbowed aside (see the “irregularities” campaign chairman Ed Rollins claimed last night) — in particular three supporters say that those running the caucus didn’t follow the correct process. One in particular is most outspoken:
Kim Davis of Lakewood in Pierce County outlined her experience in an e-mail….“I think that was the trigger that fired the shot,” [Huckabee Washignton volunteer leader Joseph] Fuiten said.
In an interview, Davis said she “absolutely” thought McCain supporters rigged voting in her precinct because she and a Ron Paul supporter were denied a chance to run to be delegates.
“They didn’t follow the process. No one got to talk. No one got to vote,” she said.
“I felt like what they did was wrong,” she said. “If they could do that to us, I wondered how many other places could that have happened.”
We’ll see.