The results of the error-prone, possibly fraudulent, 2004 Washington state governor’s election continue to amaze. SoundPolitics has been doing an incredible job reporting on this subject for months. But a recent post illustrates why this mess could be heading towards a case of fraud.

Now, let’s suppose that Bill Huennekens publicly admitted the gaps in the absentee ballot accounting and other discrepancies prior to certification: The canvassing board would have been obligated to order that the absentee ballots be recanvassed, even if it meant a manual recount of the absentee ballot envelopes. Indeed, that would have had to be done as part of the manual recount, with partisan observers recounting all of the envelopes as others were recounting all of the ballots. Similar efforts would have been conducted to manually recanvass poll books and provisional ballots. After all, other errors were corrected by recanvassing certain ballots during the recounts. The “Larry Phillips” no-signature ballots were recanvassed, adding 566 mostly Gregoire votes to the tally. If they could do that, they should have also manually recanvassed any other known discrepancies, such as the surplus of hundreds more ballots than voters. They would have had to correct, or at least report, these errors.

If the numbers of ballots still equalled the sum of the absentee ballot envelopes, provisional envelopes and poll book signatures, then fine. If it were disclosed that there were still hundreds more ballots than there were voter signatures, then the post-election political dynamic would have been very different. The legislature could not have gotten away with simply certifying Gregoire’s “129 vote victory” without some other remedy.

These are excellent points. The election workers KNEW that unresolved problems would halt the final manual recount (anyone truly think a manual recount of millions of ballots is more accurate than machine counts? If so, why do we use computers?). If the final recount was halted due to errors larger than the margin, the last count would have been the established baseline and Rossi would have been in a position to claim victory. So democrat election managers in a democrat county knowingly certify a flawed count, which pretty much leads one to conclude they did this to fraudutlently give the impression their preferred choice would be seen as the winner.

These people in Washington state sold out our democratic form of government for their personal priorities.