Recount Drama Continues Tonight

The P-I tonight has this story: "Republicans to sue King County over 573 ballots," which lays out their objections to counting these newly discovered ballots. In response, Democratic State Party Chairman Paul Berendt says, "Dino Rossi is the accidental Gov.-Elect, the only reason he was in the lead at the end of the last count is because of King County's mistake. Now that the mistakes are being fixed, (Republicans) want to stop valid votes from being counted." In an email to supporters, the Dems also claim: "The GOP has never said a word about the hundreds of ballots added into the count that favored Dino Rossi. And Democrats never objected to counties correcting mistakes in ways that favored Rossi. For example, in the machine count, Snohomish added in 223 ballots that were never counted, and Rossi picked up votes because of it. Chelan found a ballot that should have been counted before but wasn't. It was a Rossi vote, and it was added in and the GOP had no problem with it. Whatcom found 7 new ballots, and Rossi gained because of it." The Seattle Times hasn't posted a new story on this yet. Meanwhile, in Ohio, "Ohio Justice Throws Out Election Challenge," from the AP, but the suit will be refiled tomorrow. Sandeep Kaushik writes in The Stranger about Ohio in, "THE OTHER RECOUNT---Suspicions About Elections Fraud Persist." He mentions your resident blogger and says "Howard Martin's seattlefordean.com website has been assiduously linking to relevant press reports about developments in Ohio and elsewhere. Okay, I'm writing about it." He also says: "This week the state will begin a recount of the presidential vote, paid for by the Greens and Libertarians. On Monday, Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan held a hearing in Columbus to investigate electoral "irregularities." Jesse Jackson has suggested that Democrats formally object to Ohio's Electoral College delegation. The Kerry campaign has offered tentative (and, sigh, nuanced) support for those pressing for a closer look at what happened there. Good for them. Obviously, none of it is going to change a goddamn thing." He defends the election folks in King County and Secretary of State Sam Reed, preferring to put the responsibility for our vote problems on "a second-rate, piecemeal, jury-rigged (if not outright rigged) system of administering elections that undercuts faith in the integrity of electoral results on the part of a wide--and growing--swath of the electorate. And, tragically, that is not going to change any time soon." As usual, his article is worth reading and thinking about. Also from Ohio, "Senator Kerry's and Senator Edwards' state counsel for Ohio has issued a letter to Ohio Republican Secretary of State and Bush-Cheney '04 chair Kenneth Blackwell demanding an official investigation into voting machine tampering in Hocking County, RAW STORY has learned."-from their article.