New vote looks more likely for WA governor

It has been one of the strangest and most interesting stories of the past two months; the race for governor of Washington State should have been long over, but a combination of a dead split among voters and a series of bizarre procedural issues and a patchwork of court decisions has thrown the whole thing back up into the air. Republican Dino Rossi won the original count by 261 votes. This triggered an automatic machine recount that gave Rossi a 42 vote margin, but it still wasn't over. The state Democratic party then paid for a manual state-wide recount. In this recount Democrat Christine Gregoire squeaked out a 129 vote lead and was certified as the Governor-elect. However, both the Democrats and Republicans have raised a number of serious procedural concerns about everything from the counting of provisional ballots to spoiled ballots to ballots that were only added to the hand recount after the Democrats went door to door in King county looking for people to sign affidavits saying they "intended" to vote for Gregoire. The latest twists are that King County (Seattle) has certified a count with 3000 votes more then the number of actual voters based on the poll logs! The Seattle Times is also reporting that a large number of provisional ballots were fed directly into voting machines rather then being placed in envelopes and not counted until their validity could be verified. All this has led to a ground swell of support for throwing the whole bloody election out the window and re-voting, a la Ukraine. Sad, but true. The whole process is so damaged at this point that it is simply impossible to know who rightly won the election. Given that most of the blunders and malfeasance seems to have occurred in heavily Democratic regions, I would guess it is Rossi, but it is simply beyond knowing at this point. The best solution is for the voters of Washington to get the chance to make their voices heard clearly and unambiguously. Therefore, The Freeman's Burden is calling for a new election and asking all residents of Washington State to go to the on-line petition and add your name to the rapidly growing role of residents who want to see the rightful candidate residing in the Governor's Mansion in Olympia.