an election that algore would love

The Washington state governor's race is in the midst of the thrid count over six week after election day. Sound Politics has been doing an admirable job of reporting the antics.

Repulican Dino Rossi won both the election and the first recount with a razor thin margin. The throught of having to give up power has apparently galvanized the democratic party establishment there to become more and more desperate; even more so since Rossi's win was not predicted by the polls that democrats seem to love more than actual results these days. Most recently, the democrats have been "finding" new ballots in democrat-friendly areas.

So far, the state courts have been unwilling to rewrite the rules -- in sharp contrast to Florida's Supreme court in the 2000 presidential election which kept making up gore-favorable new couting rules until they were spanked by the U.S. Supreme court.

The problem here are rules that permit canvassing boards (sometimes highly partisan) to attempt to determine the intent of the voter. How about a simple rule that if you don't fill your ballot our correctly, it doesn't count.