RALEIGH – Do over.
That’s the unanimous verdict of North Carolina’s state board of elections after hearing about Election Day problems in the House District 10 Republican primary pitting incumbent Steve LaRoque against challenger Willie Ray Starling. I didn’t hear the attorneys for LaRoque and Starling make the case before the elections board, so perhaps I have missed a critical argument or piece of information that would change my mind. But at first glance it appears that a do-over is the right choice. To allow Starling to claim victory by a margin of only seven votes, with more than that many voters complaining about how elections officials ran the balloting, would not have been in the public interest.
The LaRoque-Starling race – a rematch from 2004 – was part of the broader Republican struggle over party identity and the Richard Morgan alliance with House Speaker Jim Black. Elected first in 2002 in a swing seat, LaRoque chose to support the Black-Morgan alliance over the GOP caucus nominee. Despite that, LaRoque’s district was redrawn in 2003 to be a bit more Democratic than before (I’m not sure he ever recognized or accepted that fact). He did exercise more clout as a newcomer to the House than he otherwise would have, I suppose, and apparently believes that the policies enacted by the Black-Morgan House were preferable to what a Republican House would have yielded.
That’s his prerogative. Just as it is the prerogative of Republican primary voters, accurately and sufficiently informed of this fact, to decide whether to renew or withdraw their endorsement of LaRoque.
Unfortunately, said Republican primary voters did not express a clear preference in the May 2 balloting. While other anti-Morgan candidates won their GOP primaries by large enough margins to decide the issue unambiguously, Starling’s margin over LaRoque started minuscule and later shrank. In any election, in any jurisdiction – be in urban or rural, Democratic or Republican, with touch-screen machines or paper ballots – enough honest mistakes and miscommunication can occur to draw a cloud over any margin of victory that can be counted on a single person’s fingers and toes. In the District 10 case, some unaffiliated voters said they did not receive the Republican ballot they needed to cast their vote (for LaRoque). In addition, some of the voting machines malfunctioned early on Election Day, causing delays.
Now, I agree with those who say that voter mistakes do not constitute sufficient grounds for re-doing an election. If poor instructions or miscommunication by elections officials or workers contribute to the mistakes, however, I think voters have a right to be upset – just as in 2004 I wrote that voters, mostly Democrats, whose ballots were cast aside because they voted provisionally in the wrong precinct had a legitimate grievance, because they had been following the instructions of elections officials at the time. The main question in the 2006 District 10 case is whether poll workers should have asked unaffiliated voters whether they wanted to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary. Apparently, the question wasn’t asked (some voters also said that even though they stated a preference, they still did not receive the proper ballot).
Yes, there must come a point at which an imperfect election can be declared over, since all elections will be imperfect, staged as they are by imperfect human beings. The standard surely cannot be Al Gore’s preposterous standard in the 2000 Florida case, which was essentially that the ballots should be counted and re-counted in whatever fashion would make him president. (If you think I’m kidding, work your way back through the Gore team’s legal arguments back then and see how inconsistent they were. Even today, after several media recounts showing otherwise, there are still people who believe that Gore wuz robbed.) But when the margin is just seven votes, and credible evidence indicates that as many voters might have been stymied by inadequate instructions or machine problems, another election, though admittedly costly, is the wisest course of action.
Over to you, LaRoque and Starling supporters. Settle things for us, please.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.