#48#
If there's one thing that turns out to be less interesting than two lawyers reading a deposition like a script, it's one lawyer asking questions from a script of questions already asked in a deposition, hoping the witness will say something different so that the lawyer can shout A-HA!
That's basically the gist of what happened in Day Two of the Challenge in Chelan(TM). Sure, there was a local warm-up act; home county Auditor Evelyn Arnold got the chance to politely preen about her 29,000 voters who voted mostly by mail but did show up to barely use 7 polling stations--and who were kind enough to vote in such an orderly fashion as to allow her to perfectly reconcile ballots to voter credits. But the main fish of the day for Rossi's team was King Elections Supervisor Bill Huennekens, a somewhat bird-looking man who pecked about at his answers, making sure he was offering not only correct but consistent information to GOP counsel.
And counsel Rob McGuire did everything he could to try to throw Huennekens off balance, short of the old "throw a book and make the guy with the neck brace turn suddenly" trick Mike Brady first used in traffic court. (Was there anything he couldn't do? I mean, first white guy with a jeri curl!) First McGuire asked to treat Huennekens as a hostile witness, which Judge Bridges rejected, but McGuire resorted alternatively to treating him as a merely shifty witness.
At one point he figured he had caught him, when Huennekens averred that he hadn't known about the absentee ballot reconciliation extrapolation when submitting the results for certification, although he had known about the troubles the new 'DIMS' system for tracking ballots was having. (Sidebar: Postman collects some of the more freaked out emails about the DIMS difficulties, which workers blamed on computers, and which tech support people blamed on--you guessed it, workers. However, he also saliently points out that the system first went online in June, per spec at 6 months but in a third of the normal implementation period). According to McGuire, ballot supervisor Nicole Way claims he DID know. At this point counsel Hamilton for King objected on a hearsay basis, noting that Way would be the star witness tomorrow, and she could make that claim herself.
After the interminable length of time it took for McGuire to try to corner Huennekens, Hamilton crossed with a line of questioning that amounted basically to, "Isn't your job like, really hard and stuff?" It was the proper line of questioning on a legal basis, but from a PR/media standpoint it looks like the Shit Happens defense. Here's Postman at ST giving a taste from his generally quite good dispatches:
amilton: "Is it possible with 300,000 people showing up on one day, being managed by 3,000 poll workers, that everything would work perfectly without any paperwork errors at all?"
Huennekens: "I don't think it's conceivable for it to be absolutely perfect."
Hamilton: "Democracy is sometimes messy?"
Huennekens: "Sure, yeah."
Hamilton: "But you do your best to conduct the administration of the election in a fair and impartial manner?"
Huennekens: "Yes, I believe we do."
OK, so "Democracy is messy" is a nicer way of putting it, but you get the idea. As I said, it's extremely important for King and the Democrats to make clear that normal error, incompetence, and even subverted policy don't amount to evidence of the wrong result. But this is what the Rossi team wants, for what that's worth.
Two administrative notes to close out the day:
Archerhouse at Kos is using his two-a-day allottment of diaries to put up a morning and evening live-blog recap of the proceedings. It's more detailed than Postman's and occurs more frequently, and also has the benefit of offering comments--but in another indication that this trial has turned into a delight for only the truly insane trial junkies among us, you'll need to bring some friends in order to have much of a discussion.
And on the docket for the rest of the week: tomorrow we're projected to hear from Nicole Way, the co-consipirator who failed algebra and went ahead in supplying X for the reconciliation formula. Once that's done, count on at least a full day--I'm betting more--on the trial within a trial, the Frye Hearing. Rossi's people will try to convince Bridges that proportional deduction is cool, it's hot, it's the latest statistical fad, everyone's doing it. Hamilton and Durkan will--and I'm speaking as a professional data and statistical analyst here--hopefully expose it for the sham of poorly applied demographic and political science that it is. Sooner or later Bridges is going to have to start making some real decisions without punting, and this would look to be his first one. So things should pick up a little bit tomorrow with the Scarlet Falsifier joining Frye on the agenda. Stay tuned.
--TJ
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