The story of ‘Three Bob Night’ was no aberration in today’s GOP

We had some laughs with the spicy political tale of the “Three Bobs.” Some lawyers got paid. But after a few days of intrigue, the story is apparently over.

It shouldn’t be.

In case you are no political junkie, “Three Bob Night,” as The Seattle Times headline punsters dubbed it, broke out last Friday when two last-second candidates named “Bob Ferguson” filed to run as Democrats for governor. They were punking the other Bob Ferguson, the state attorney general who has been angling to run for governor for years.

It seemed a sham. And then a longtime Republican activist named Glen Morgan proudly admitted he did it to sabotage the Democrats.

“If I had started a little bit earlier, I would have been able to have six Bob Fergusons,” Morgan boasted to Times reporter Claire Withycombe. “I contacted about 12. I just ran out of time.”

Ha ha, it was going to be endless Bob summer. Except oops. Misleading voters in precisely this way has been against state law for 81 years. Turns out it’s a felony.

On Monday the other Bobs, rattled, withdrew their names. Conflict over, election back to normal. Right?

Not so fast. Here are some after-action thoughts on the Bobapoolaza, and why I think what happened is no one-off. It’s worth more discussion, including by state legislators, who ought to consider changes to state election law.

Point No. 1. You know how Republicans have been out pretending to search for election fraud for years now? They’ve conducted phony audits, attended conspiratorial presentations, and traveled to “stop the steal” conferences hosted by that My Pillow guy.

Well damned if the fake quest didn’t finally turn up something real!

Sure it’s more as if OJ had ever caught the real killer. But this, it turns out, is what actual criminal election fraud looks like.

That it was carried out by the Washington State Republican Party’s 2023 “Volunteer of the Year” — who on his website says that election integrity and rooting out corruption are two of his passions — is the sort of irony that newspaper columnists are not permitted to pass up. I could lose my license.

Point No. 2. Joking aside, letting this pass with just a laugh is a ticket to more of the same.

The Three Bobs was kind of a low-rent version of the fake elector scheme of 2020, in which the Donald Trump campaign went around getting states to appoint bogus Electoral College representatives. Fake electors, fraudulent candidates — you think they wouldn’t repeat either in the future if they thought there’d be zero consequences?

To that end, state law doesn’t just say this was wrong for the two candidates. Another section of state law, RCW 29A.84.270 if you’re scoring at home, says that whoever comes up with the conspiracy to recruit the fake candidates also is guilty of a felony. That could be Morgan, the GOP activist. There also are possible civil fines up to the salary of the elected position being sought (governor, which pays $198,257).

It’s remarkable how this old law, passed in 1943, spells out exactly what happened here. It must have happened before.

Rather than confess he erred, Morgan has pledged “aggressive and extensive legal action” against anyone who challenges him. He also blamed the victim.

“The attorney general should be ashamed of himself,” Morgan told the Washington State Standard after his scheme had collapsed Monday. “He threatens the little people as always to promote himself.”

That’s some Trump-scale grievance and projection. Doesn’t sound like lessons were learned, does it? It means that something like this will probably just happen again.

Which brings me to Point No. 3. Why do we make it so easy to simply purchase spots on the public’s election ballot?

A gobsmacking 30 candidates filed to run for governor. It could be worse: In 2020, the governor’s primary had 36 candidates. That included perennials like Alex Tsimerman (running as always to “stop Seattle fascism with idiotic face!”), Goodspaceguy (who after about two dozen failed runs is vying for Senate this time) and Leon Lawson (a “Trump Republican” who posts Q-Anon slogans and fake Department of Justice “terror MAGA warnings” on his website).

This year’s crop also includes someone running under the banner of the “Nonsense Busters” party, which doesn’t exist. Our system allows candidates to file under made-up parties. A U.S. House candidate is running for a party called “Congress Sucks,” which, while a true statement, also doesn’t exist.

In the past we had a candidate named Mike the Mover who used the public ballot as an ad billboard for his company of the same name. He claimed he would get $150,000 of business in return for his roughly thousand-dollar candidate filing fee.

“This is vandalism to the ballot,” former King County Prosecuting Attorney Dan Satterberg said Monday. He was talking about the three-headed Bob, but it could be said about our ballot every year.

Sure this is what we get with democracy — the rough with the smooth. But maybe we could set our democracy bar just a bit higher?

The Secretary of State’s Office says anyone can file for governor if they pay $1,982, or if they submit 1,982 signatures of registered voters. All 30 candidates this year simply paid the fee. (The fraudulent two apparently had their fee money raised by Morgan.)

So why not require both? Any legit candidate for statewide office could get the contributions and the signatures from other politically engaged people. For the third-party candidates, like the socialists, the greens or the libertarians, it’d take some work but wouldn’t be an insurmountable hurdle.

But the grifters, the loons — and especially the fakers? They’d at least have to run their cockamamie schemes past other human beings before they foisted them on the rest of us.