When last we visited the gubernatorial goings-on in Washington state, “do-over” was the word.

Over the weekend, the big news was a “smoking gun” report from Seattle-area election officials regarding uncounted, unsigned ballots. Republican party chair Chris Vance said “the report shows that election managers were working on the signature problem months ago, that the voters in question failed to fix the problem and that the managers misled the public in saying an error was discovered for the first time after [GOP candidate Dino] Rossi was certified as the winner, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

The Seattle Times adds:

King County election workers were told as early as May that if an absentee ballot came in without a matching signature on file they were required to make a concerted effort to verify that the vote was valid.

Seattle blogger Stefan Sharkansky pokes fun at the expedient discovery of uncounted ballots here and Jim Miller continues his insightful analysis of the “distributed voter fraud” phenomenon here.

To be continued…

Update: John Fund has much more and his concluding observation should be heeded…

Washington state’s predicament is also a warning flare for the rest of the country about how sloppy our election procedures still are. In most states we are just as unable to handle a photo-finish election as we were when the Bush v. Gore legal fight occurred in 2000; It’s time to redouble our efforts to make our elections something the rest of the world can’t snicker at.

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