Elections Director: "Absentee Ballots Mistakenly Rejected"

The Associated Press reports that the Elections Director in Seattle's King County said Monday that hundreds of absentee ballots were mistakenly rejected in the heavily Democratic County:

Logan said election workers mistakenly rejected 561 absentee ballots because they thought signatures on the ballots did not match original voter registration records.

However, he said that the signatures simply were not on file in the county's computerized voter registration system and that original registration records should have been checked.

"We need to correct the error and count those votes," Logan said in a statement.

A statewide hand recount, the third count in Washington's gubernatorial election, is under way after Republican Rossi came out ahead first by 261 votes, then in a mandatory machine recount by 42 votes.

Washington's Supreme court was to hear arguments this afternoon on the Democratic Party's lawsuit seeking to clarify ballot-counting rules:

Republicans say it's an effort to change the rules after the game has already been lost.

"The issue at hand is do we abide by the rules or do we change the rules midway through the election," Lane said Saturday.

The Democrats say they're trying to ensure that every vote gets counted.

Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire, in a letter on her Web site, said "the Democratic Party has gone to the Supreme Court to fix mistakes that kept legitimate votes from being counted before."

The count them till the Democrat wins approach is raising an interesting question: Which counting method is more reliable and accurate? Human or machine?

According to the Associated Press, experts tend to favor the machine recount.

The fact that Washington moved away from hand counting paper ballots decades ago, and has used machines and computers to tabulate the votes that are cast in a variety of ways -- by punch cards, fill-in-the-oval optical scan or ATM-style touch-screen indicates that the Washington legislature thought machines were more accurate.

So why does the law still allow the losing side to call for a third count?

UPDATE: Professor Bainbridge posts that if Gregoire ends up winning after this recount, there needs to be a very serious Federal investigation as to whether there was vote fraud in King County.

All Things Policy, Matt Schuh is concerned that the voting irregularities are becoming so regular.

UPDATE II: At White Pebble, Patti posts that she thought she had it bad, living in Ohio.

Michelle Malkin calls the Washington gubernatorial race a neverending election.

At Blogs For Bush, Mark Noonan posts that the Democrats are out to steal the election.