Woaaahh Nellie...

The WA State Governors Race is close. Dino Rossi won the first count with a couple hundred votes. There was a mandatory recount and he won again with a slim margin of 42 votes. Still a winner. If two people are neck and neck coming to the finish line of a marathon, the one an inch or two further is the Winner, the person just behind them is #2 and not the Winner... The Democrats want a hand recount but according to the Michael Medved fan website, this last manditory recount offered the opportunity for people in King County to: bq. try(ing) to determine voter intent and then duplicating, or "enhancing," the ballots This perfidy happened and was blithely reported by the Seattle Times in this article: bq. A governor by Christmas? The closest gubernatorial race in Washington history just keeps getting closer � and has thrust the state into what one party leader is calling the "Twilight Zone" of politics. bq. As things stand, with counties bracing for an unprecedented second recount, voters will probably not know until at least mid-December whether their new governor is Republican Dino Rossi or Democrat Christine Gregoire. Election officials are even starting to think about what to do if no winner is decided before inauguration day in January. OK so far but here it gets interesting (scroll down a bit): bq. Republican leaders were angered by King County's handling of ballots that were rejected by the counting machines due to voter errors. bq. In many cases, election workers were trying to determine voter intent and then duplicating, or "enhancing," the ballots so they could be tallied. Smells like ballot fraud to me... There is a link from this article to this one: bq. Official has doubt about hand tally As weary King County election workers faced the daunting prospect of having to recount 898,000 ballots by hand, the county's director of elections expressed doubt that a hand count would produce a more precise result than the machine recount finished yesterday. bq. "When you're talking about close to 900,000 pieces of paper, I think the machine count is going to be more accurate than a manual count," said Dean Logan, the elections director. "You introduce another human interface into the process. There's a margin there for errors to be made."