As Seth notes below, John Fund asks in today's WSJ Opinion Journal "Will Democrats steal the Washington governorship?"

Well they're certainly going to try. I heard on KUOW this morning (can't find any report on line) that Gregoire will definitely ask for a hand recount this week.

How should the Republicans respond?

First, it's important to reiterate that Dino Rossi won two statewide counts; even after the Gregoire people won all of their legal and procedural fights to obtain certain unfair advantages; even after they were permitted to hand in questionable (and in some cases illegally cast) ballots; even after a partial hand recount in King County where election officials (aided by haruspices?) were allowed to use their own judgment to somehow "divine" the intent behind hundreds of improperly marked ballots.

Dino Rossi is the Governor-Elect, fair and square. The only reason we might accept the legitimacy of yet another recount is if we are convinced beyond any reasonable doubt that it would be more accurate and not less accurate than either of the first two counts. But there is no reason to believe that a statewide hand recount would not be less accurate then the two previous counts. Indeed, Secretary of State Sam Reed said in last Wednesday's press conference (available online here) that hand recounts are not more accurate and King County elections director also agrees that "the machine count is going to be more accurate than a manual count".

In short, by attempting to overturn the decision of Washington's voters with a less accurate vote count, Christine Gregoire and the Democrats have declared a form of civil war on the people of this state. They are morally equivalent to the corrupt Ukrainian autocrats who have tried to steal the election from its rightful winners in the opposition.

We have to fight back against the Democrats' illegitimate moves to steal the election. The best way that I can think of to do that is to discredit the recount by continually reminding everyone about the inaccuracy, human error, sloppiness and opportunities for fraud that permeate the process. Let's start by looking at "King County's 336 Mystery Ballots" and then wrap up by asking "Who voted, anyway? What are their names?"

King County's 336 Mystery Ballots
While most of the attention last week was on King County's 700+ surgically enhanced haruspex ballots, it is also the case that King County discovered 336 brand new ballots that weren't counted the first time. Richard Pope pointed this out in a comment to an earlier post. I poked through the County's precinct canvass files, posted here.

There are indeed 336 ballots that were not counted during the first count, but somehow showed up in time for the recount -- 198 Absentee ballots, 33 Polling ballots and 105 "Add-on" ballots (provisional and other exceptions). These are in addition to the 717 improperly filled out ballots that were examined by the canvassing board to divine voter intent. 134 of these 336 Mystery Ballots came from Seattle (40%), which is slightly higher than Seattle's share of the County's registered voters and total of votes cast (35-36%).

I called the King County Elections office and asked Superintendent of Elections Bill Huennekens to explain the 336 Mystery Ballots. Apparently there was a batch of 160 or so absentee ballots that "simply didn't show up the first time around". He had no other explanation, other than observing that these things always happen and out of 900,000 ballots [898,238 to be exact] the error rate is very low and proportional to other counties. I pressed him on the 33 newly discovered "Polling" ballots. Shouldn't these have been reconciled with the precinct poll counts? Every voter who shows up at a poll signs in and can be counted. Wouldn't the number of ballots be reconciled against the number of voters at each precinct? They were reconciled during the first count, he explained. Nevertheless, 147 brand new Polling ballots appeared and 114 previously counted Polling ballots disappeared, as if by magic, for a net change of 33 brand new ballots. Likewise, the net new 198 absentee ballots came from 813 newly discovered absentees, less 698 previously existing and reconciled absentees that somehow vanished.

Huennekens said quite honestly that this is a "human process", that "inspectors are fallible and they're human". Fair enough. So increasing the role of the fallible human inspectors, who can make errors in the reconciled ballot counts by the hundreds will only introduce more error into a manual recount that should be rejected before it even begins.

Who voted, anyway? What are their names?
One of the clearest indications I've seen that the Ukrainian election was rigged is this map showing an astonishing increase in voter turnout in the eastern Ukraine, in the regions favoring the old guard. If it was known who these mysterious new voters were, observers could count the number of voters and reconcile whether all of these ballots were attributable to living eligible voters who only voted once.

Likewise, here in WA we would have more confidence in our election if we knew that every counted ballot was cast by a living eligible voter who only voted once. The easy way to do that is to simply post the list of the names of the voters who cast ballots along with their precinct and address. The number of voters per precinct would have to agree with the total number of votes recorded per precinct. Other voters could verify whether everybody who voted is a living eligible voter who lives where they say they live. All of this information is part of the public record. At least in King County, anybody can obtain a copy of the voter registration roll with all of this information. All you need is to pay a nominal fee and sign a pledge to use the information only for appropriate purposes. The question is, when will this voter list be available? It should be available as part of the same deliverable as any certified count and recount.

But it's not. Bill Huennekens explained that updating the voter roll is a lower priority task and won't be completed until sometime after the recount is certified. It's not necessarily his fault, those are the guidelines he's working under. On the other hand, how can the rest of us have much confidence in our election system if we don't even know who voted and whether the number of actual voters is the same as the number of votes cast?

We should not accept any recount ("Count every vote", the Democrats whine) unless we can also verify that every vote counted was also legitimately cast. Without an accurate list of voters, there is no way to do this.

Gregoire declared war by attempting to use a less accurate recount to overturn the results of two more accurate counts. We should fight back not only by unequivocally denouncing the next recount as illegitimate, but by demanding an overall clean-up of the entire electoral process to prevent any similar monkey business in the future.