The Farcical Land of King County

With “Governor-elect” Gregoire scheduled to be sworn in tomorrow, you’d think King County would be taking extra special measures to appear above board. But you’d be wrong.

Three days after King County election officials explained most of a controversial discrepancy between the number of ballots cast and voters known to have voted, the gap has grown again. After whittling the discrepancy from 3,539 votes to 1,217 last week, officials yesterday said they had made a mistake. The number of votes now unaccounted for is “somewhere around 1,800,” county Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens said yesterday.

Yet voters in Washington State are still expected to have confidence in the outcome of the election? Apparently so:

Huennekens said the larger number of unaccounted-for votes should not shake people’s confidence in the outcome of an election that he said was still “99.9x” percent accurate.

Maybe, but that’s a problem when the outcome is decided by 0.0000459% of the votes.