Oops! They Did It Again

How much more screwed up does the King County count need to be before a court takes notice and throws out the fraud-wracked Washington gubernatorial election?

Three days after King County election officials explained most of a controversial discrepancy between the number of ballots cast and voters known to have voted, the gap has grown again.

After whittling the discrepancy from 3,539 votes to 1,217 last week, officials yesterday said they had made a mistake.

The number of votes now unaccounted for is "somewhere around 1,800," county Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens said yesterday.

It's impossible to come up with a precise number, Huennekens said, because workers are adding and deleting names of registered voters as they update the list in preparation for a Feb. 8 special election.

Huennekens said the numbers released Friday were wrong because the names of 1,003 voters appeared twice on the voter list. Not all of them voted in the November election. Computer experts are trying to figure out why some names were on the list twice.

It seems manifestly clear that there are at least 10 times the margin of victory in unknown votes, along with all the other problems. Where is Jesse Jackson? Where is Barbara Boxer? Where is the Congressional Black Caucus? Where, oh where, are the host of Democrats who protested the Ohio vote? It seems they don’t care when the margin is close and any change will benefit a Republican – proving that the mantra of “count every vote” doesn’t apply here – unless we are talking about counting illegitimate votes for their preferred candidate.