''Ballot checks vary widely across state''

That's Washington state the Sunday Seattle Times' front page headline and article is referring to. The story leads the reader to conclude that we need some statewide standards and procedures. For comparison purposes, here's a new account of what happened in one county in Ohio: "Anomalies were found. Almost all of the witnesses that I spoke with felt that the ballots were not in random order, that they had been previously sorted. There would be long spurts of votes for only one candidate and then long spurts for another, which seemed statistically improbable to most. From what they were able to get through, witnesses found that signature counts were very much different from the official recorded number of ballots. At the time of the orientation, Jacqui Maiden stated that there will be no visual inspection of the remaining 600,000-some ballots in the county."-from the post on Democratic Underground about the recount going on now in Ohio (scroll down to "Inside story from the recounters". The folks at "Election Fraud 2004" have put together a slide show. but you have to give them your name and email address to view it. Update: The LA Times puts the race in perspective: "This is a cosmic coin flip; it is a 500-year flood in terms of voting," said Lance T. LeLoup, a political science professor at Washington State University. "To be 42 votes apart out of nearly 3 million cast — that is just unbelievably close."-from the story, "Governor's Race So Close, Yet So Divisive."