Gilday pleads for patience as 10th Legislative District race marches on

With every vote making a substantial difference, the 10th Legislative District remains neck and neck as Greg Gilday trails Clyde Shavers by just 238 votes after holding a brief 15-vote lead Tuesday.

“Vote rehab is definitely going to be necessary,” Gilday said on The Jason Rantz Show. “We’ve already started that on our side, going out and contacting all those voters whose ballots have been rejected, does the signature mismatch or what not, getting them to get their declarations into the county auditor so we can get their votes counted.”

Gilday stated that throughout the district, there are hundreds of ballots that need to be rehabbed, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg with the state’s election issues.

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“I’d like to preface this by saying I do not believe that there are any shenanigans going on, counts are just slow. But I mean, they’re slow,” Gilday said. “And that just gives the optics of something is happening. And it gives a lot of people who want to find malfeasance more and more opportunities to try to look for it and to find it. And so I really do think that we need to improve our voting system in this state, making it more transparent and making it a little bit speedier.”

Elections in the U.S. have taken days, if not weeks, to announce winners of certain races. Brazil recently had a runoff for its presidential election, and still had a full vote count available in just a few hours, according to Bloomberg.

It could take as many as two weeks to finish counting ballots in Arizona, according to The Washington Post.

“And obviously, we have to wait for the ballots to be mailed, so there’s going to be some lag there. But the fact that Skagit County still has over 14,000 ballots to count, I mean, those could have been done maybe even if it’s just planning ahead to work on the weekends,” Gilday said. “A little bit to do, a little overtime.”

One reason for the slow process is the complicated nature of the country’s elections. This midterm saw every state vote for the U.S. House of Representatives, while two-thirds of the states voted on the Senate elections. Thirty-six states had gubernatorial elections and all states had a plethora of local elections, including measures.

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Another reason for the chaotic voting results is the lack of an overarching national election commission.

“Instead, 13,000 independent local entities manage elections without uniform procedures,” said Robert Pastor with the ACE Electoral Knowledge Network. “The 50 states are theoretically responsible for supervising elections, but few exercise much responsibility or even oversight.”

To see if your vote counted, you can check Washington state’s vote tracker with just your name and date of birth.

Listen to the Jason Rantz Show weekday afternoons from 3 – 6 p.m. on KTTH 770 AM (or HD Radio 97.3 FM HD-Channel 3). Subscribe to the podcast here.