David Neiwert, at his superb blog
Orcinus, has a lengthy but up-to-date rundown of the Washington recount and subsequent sniveling from Rossi. (His comparisions to Florida 2000 are especially apt.) Read the whole thing, but some snippets:
But King County was one of the few places where the votes trended Gregoire's way, so Republicans -- playing the same kind of cherry-picking tactics they had earlier accused Democrats of using -- decided to contest the counting of those ballots in that county only, by filing a suit to prevent it. So much for having faith in the voters, not lawyers.
What was especially noteworthy was that all of the discoveries of mistakes in King County were mistakes that heavily favored Rossi. That is, what they actually signalled was the possibility that Republican operatives within the elections office had made "mistakes" that gave Rossi an illegitimate win and let him claim an initial victory. But using the reverse offense tactics that became famous in Florida, Republicans took to the airwaves charging that the discovery of these mistakes could only be explained by fraud or incompetence on the part of Democrats.
Nothing that's happened in Washington have painted an especially good picture of the Republican party, but the "re-vote" movement is particularly pathetic. Especially noteworthy is his description of the "fraud" charges:
The chief piece of evidence raised so far is a discrepancy of 3,500 votes in the final King County tabulations; tallies showed that many more votes than people who had actually signed in to vote. But, as always, the GOP was jumping the gun,
comparing preliminary tabulations to the finished tallies, which will not be complete for another week and a half.
The GOP went hunting for more of these discrepancies, and today announced it had found more of them in counties that went for Gregoire. In all, it found some 8,500 "phantom votes." But as the story points out, these kinds of discrepancies are extremely common in all elections -- in fact, they're endemic, and will increase the greater the volumes of voters. The 2004 election tallied more votes than any in the history of the state.
Moreover, what the story doesn't point out is that the GOP did not seem to look for "phantom votes" in Rossi counties -- even though there is a statistical certainty that they will appear there as well.
The irony in all this is of course so thick you could cut it with a knife, and getting worse by the day.