''Healers or spoilers?''

In an editorial. commenting on the GOP's "smoking gun of the day" media message blitz, the P-I says Thursday that, "There are several roles a minority party can play in a legislative body. Roles run from the laudable "loyal opposition" to the lamentable pouting obstructionist. The state Republican Party hints of assuming the latter role in its vitriol over the gubernatorial election." Exhibit One: "State Republicans Wednesday charged that hundreds of provisional ballots MAY have been counted on Election Day without being verified," from the AP story, "Wash. GOP Demands New Governor Election." Exhibit Two: "Two King County election workers, BOTH REPUBLICANS. yesterday said they believe hundreds of provisional ballots were illegally fed through vote-counting machines on Election Day." from today's Seattle Times story, "GOP: Hundreds of ballots suspect." Exhibit Three: "Escalating his daily drumbeat for a revote for governor...GOP announces 'bombshell' in voting...There may be many smoking guns."-from the new P-I story Thursday: "At a Bellevue news conference, Vance produced a Republican-appointed King County election worker, Joe O'Donnell, who said he personally witnessed about 150 to 300 provisional ballots go straight into AccuVote tabulating machines on Election Day without any voter verification. And county election officials continued to take umbrage at what they said were the Republicans' unwarranted suggestions that election fraud occurred. The officials blamed the accusations on a misunderstanding of why the number of votes cast in the Nov. 2 election may have been several thousand more than the number of people credited with voting. "It's not fraud. It's not understanding how the elections process really works and then it's this stirring of the pot with inaccurate information," said Carolyn Diepenbrock, the Snohomish County elections manager. Snohomish County's Diepenbrock said the 300-vote discrepancy in her county was probably due mostly to human errors in the tedious, labor-intensive, post-election process of entering general election voters' names into files as part of the process of updating voter records for future elections. "I would like to say there should never, ever, ever be any discrepancy. But that's not reality," Diepenbrock said. She added, "It's unfortunate that this (vote) crediting process is being attached to the election process," because they are separate, unrelated procedures. Exhibit Four: The Weekly looks inside the recount process and finds that some of the GOP appointed counters were "underhanded and blatantly partisan." But they did retreat to the GOP lounge to pray daily. Exhibit Five: The Seattle Times has this, in a commentary Wednesday from Floyd J. McKay, a journalism professor emeritus at Western Washington University: "The law clearly says that the hand count is the final count. This is not a baseball playoff, winning two of three counts means nothing. The hand count, presumed by the law to be the most accurate, is final. For a winning candidate to go through three counts and then agree to another election would defy all the laws of politics (and reason). For a candidate losing the third count to call for such an election is — well, politics again. Republicans will do all of us a favor if they take their charges to court, rather than running a four-year campaign of innuendo and slander. Tim Eyman is already on that task, urging his fans to write Olympia." Exhibit Six: "For devotees of conservative talk radio, nirvana looks a lot like the Washington governor's race, especially if Democrat Christine Gregoire hangs on and becomes governor."-from the column in Thursday's Seattle Times, "Lighting up the phone lines with a 'we-were-had' lament." Final tasty tidbit: "The Republican attack on the election is by now a near-military operation — air, land and sea. Scour death records to find dead voters. Search records to find felons who voted in violation of the law. Compare the number of voters to votes cast. Hold the outraged — OUTRAGED! — press conference du jour. Do anything and everything to put Rossi back on top. No matter what."