They’re still finding ballots from the 2004 election in King County, Wash. Blogger Stefan Sharkansky broke the story yesterday:

It just hit the fan that King County Elections recently discovered several dozen uncounted ballots at an elections office, presumably the MBOS absentee ballot facility.

Senior election officials have known about this for several days and have kept it under wraps. Logan and Huennekens presumably knew about it at last night’s town hall meeting. It’s now an open secret.

Again, this one is not an April Fools joke. I learned about this from multiple independent and highly reliable sources. I’ve checked it out with some local journalists. They’ve also heard about it and believe it to be a credible story that they’re now following up on. Stay tuned.

Ironically, Sharkansky posted this prescient April Fools item early yesterday.

The Seattle Times followed up with more details this morning:

Long after it seemed there couldn’t be any more surprises in the November governor’s election, King County officials acknowledged yesterday they have found more uncounted ballots.

Over the past week, election workers have found 87 valid absentee ballots that had been left in their envelopes and not counted through three tallies of the closest statewide race in Washington history. The ballots were in archival boxes and were found when election workers were looking for something else.

The first of the ballots were found March 24 [ed note: more than a week ago!], but officials did not publicly acknowledge the problem until a reporter asked them about it yesterday. After the initial discovery, Election Director Dean Logan ordered a search through more than a half-million absentee envelopes to look for other ballots that might not have been counted….

Secretary of State Sam Reed, the state’s chief election official, was surprised by news of the most-recently found ballots.

“Oh my gosh,” he said.

Christine Gregoire defeated Republican Dino Rossi by 129 votes.

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