The Washington state Supreme Court has ruled that hundreds of "discovered" ballots in overwhelmingly Democratic King County should be counted.

This brings Christine Gregoire a notch closer to being the Grinch Who Stole Dino Rossi's Christmas.

The Republicans should immediately move in court to have any and all rejected ballots in EVERY county of Washington reconsidered and tallied. There must be a massive effort to find any ballots in any other counties that may have been improperly thrown out. The Supreme Court of Washington has now set the precedent for any such votes to be counted.

The Democrats have today moved closer to stealing this election. It is going to take a massive, shrewd, and ruthless effort by the Rossi campaign, and the rest of the Republican party, to deny the Democrats from completely succeeding with the theft.

UPDATE: Carol Platt Liebau thinks all of this is not good for our democracy:

So now it appears that Christine Gregoire has taken the lead in the race for the Washington Governorship, thanks to a bunch of fortuitously "discovered" ballots that just "happened" to turn up in heavily Democratic King County.

Why is it that Democrats always seem to be the beneficiaries of these lucky breaks? And that they keep demanding (and paying for) recounts until a favorable result is obtained?

Whether the challenger were Democrat or Republican, though, one thing is clear: These recontested, recounted, rechallenged elections are bad for a democracy. There is a reason that we should have election procedures and that they should be strictly adhered to: Otherwise, standoffs like the one in Washington occur -- a result that is bad for any democratic republic, and which creates precedents that could come back to trouble ALL Americans later on.

The Democrats are not thinking about the consequences of these types of actions. They are concerned with obtaining power. All else is secondary.

Sound Politics (hat tip to Powerline) had this interesting item:

Crunching the data in the King [Ukraine] County voter registration file, I came across precinct SEA 37-1823, or simply Precinct 1823, located in downtown Seattle between Elliot Bay and I-5 near the James St. exit.
Precinct 1823 has 763 registered "Active" voters. 527 of them list as their residence address 500 4th Ave -- the King County Administration Building. 241 of these voters specifically note their apartment number as #553, which is the room number of the ... King [Ukraine] County Records and Elections office.

Over 300 of these alleged "voters" give 500 4th Ave. (with or without the Elections office room number) as both their residence and mailing addresses. Several of the other Elections Office residents give overseas mailing addresses, such as Anuj Rathi of Mumbai, India, Rayko Suzuki of Tokyo, Japan, and Pascal Engi of Bern, Switzerland.

Another 48 of the Precinct 1823 "voters" give as their residence address 511 3rd Ave, which appears to be some sort of private mailbox service.

And then there are the two Messrs. Harder -- Mike Harder of 509 3rd Ave. Apt. 507, who registered to vote on April 28, 2004 and Michael D. Harder of 509 3rd Ave. Apt. 507, who registered to vote on July 20, 2004. Both Messrs. Harder are flagged as permanent absentee voters.

465 (61%) of the Precinct 1823 voters registered during 2004 and nearly all of them "live" at 500 4th Ave. By contrast, only 13% of all of King County voters registered in 2004.

3 members of the List of 573 Magical Mystery Voters are from Precinct 1823, 2 of whom "live" at the Elections Office.

In the machine recount, Precinct 1823 gave 203 votes to Gregoire and 87 votes to Rossi, for a net Gregoire lead of 116 votes. The only way for Christine Gregoire to win the governor's race is to carry Precinct 1823 in a landslide.

UPDATE: Elections Superintendent Bill Huennekens explained that the residents of the Elections office are "homeless individuals", and that there is a special section of the administrative code which allows for that. He sees nothing unusual in the fact that some of these so-called homeless individuals also give mailing addresses elsewhere. I asked him what the county did to verify the identities of individuals who list the elections office as their residence and he said that they can't be treated any differently from anybody else. I take that to mean, that anybody on the planet who wants to vote (or vote again) can simply claim to be a resident of the King County Elections office.

This would be hilarious if it wasn't so serious.

UPDATE: Captain Ed:

It looks like Washington's justices have succumbed to the Florida syndrome, in which judges substitute their own ideas of fair play for the regulations established by the state legislature. At this point, it hardly makes a difference; the mess that Washington created with its election could hardly be made much worse with this latest development.

You should buy this and read it. It applies perfectly here. They can't cheat if it's not close.

UPDATE: American Thinker:

In Florida in 2000, Vice President Al Gore never took the lead. He trailed on election night. He was still behind after the mandatory statewide recount. He was behind after overseas ballots were added, and he still trailed after the hand recounts of selected heavily Democratic counties were added to the vote totals. And as all the studies undertaken in 2001 by the major newspapers and television networks showed, had the entire statewide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court not been halted by the US Supreme Court, Gore still would have finished behind Bush in Florida in the end.

Something similar has been going on in Washington State. The Republican candidate for Governor, Dino Rossi, held a lead of a few thousand votes near the end of the counting of the state’s almost two million absentee ballots (70% of Washington’s votes are cast this way). Then, in heavily Democratic King County, officials “discovered” 10,000 additional absentee ballots they had not originally included in the number remaining to be counted. In addition, a Judge ordered the County to allow Democratic Party officials to obtain the names and addresses of 929 people whose ballots were classified as provisional because of mismatched or missing signatures, so as to facilitate the inclusion of these votes. This resulted in a rather unorthodox invasion of privacy: Democratic officials contacted these 929 individuals to ask whom they had voted for in the Governor’s race. If they answered Gregoire, they were then shuttled to the county office to clear up their signature problem. This vote-mining technique added a net 400 votes for Gregoire. The 10,000 extra King County ballots added another 2,000 net votes for Gregoire. As a result of this final Gregoire surge from King County, Rossi’s lead was cut to a scant 261 votes, of about 2.9 million cast.

Then the state began a required mandatory machine recount statewide. But King County officials decided to also hand recount 700 previously “uncounted” ballots for Governor. These ballots were uncounted only in the sense that they had been put through the machine, and the machine had not detected any vote for Governor on them. In Florida terminology from the 2000 race, these were “undervotes”. The County officials went hunting for chads and found enough to net Gregoire an additional 245 votes. When added to small changes in the machine recount in other counties, Rossi’s lead slipped to just 42 votes. John Fund, the author of a new book, Stealing Elections: How Vote Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, wrote a column with a play-by-play on the Washington Governor’s race that carried the story up to the conclusion of the first recount.

The state Democratic Party then paid for a statewide hand recount of the ballots that had already been machine counted twice. The machinations of this hand recount are described every day in the brilliant group blog SoundPolitics.com. As Rossi’s statewide lead crept up to over a 120 votes as eastern Washington and more rural counties recounted their votes, desperate Democratic officials in King County reached back into their bag for one more cache of votes. This time they discovered 573 uncounted absentee votes with missing or inconsistent signatures. They found another 22 hidden near some box in an office. (As Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up).

“20 absentee and two provisional—found in several polling places in the side bins of plastic base units in which polling machines sit,” said Bill Huennekens, county election superintendent. All ballots are supposed to be logged on Election Night and returned in a sealed bag to election headquarters, but it didn’t happen with these, he said”

The 595 missing votes come from precincts within King County that voted heavily Democratic. Assuming these 573 or 595 votes break as other votes did in these precincts it might enable Gregoire to overtake Rossi statewide.

Election officials in King County voted 2 to 1 to count the newly discovered votes. Two of the three members of the King County canvassing board are Democrats. So County officials keep finding new votes in the heavily Democratic County, and the canvassing board keeps voting to count them. Some of you may recall all the times during the 2000 hand recount in Broward County, when the two Democrats found a Gore vote, and the third member of the panel, the only Republican, could not discern one. Al Gore netted 567 net votes from the Broward under-vote mining operation, enough to cut Bush's statewide lead in half.

We may know in a week or so if Democrats have found enough votes this time to get Gregoire into the lead. If this happens, the Democrats will then profess exhaustion with this long process, and ask all Washingtonians to join hands, sing Kumbaya, and accept the results as the will of the people finally being done. But in a state that has been trending Democratic - Kerry beat Bush by 7%, and both US Senators and 6 of 9 US House members are Democrats - the raw and heavy-handed search for votes in King County to elect Gregoire seems to be putting-off even some Democrats. A large majority of Washington residents indicated in a survey last week that they were uncomfortable with the continued recounts, and accepted the election of Rossi after the first recount was concluded.

But power, and jobs and money are at stake in a Governor’s election. The Democrats will not fold up their tents simply because a majority of voters would prefer clean elections.

UPDATE: John Fund writes us:

"I fear the only practical solution is a new election given the tainted nature of so much of the recount process...there is also no way Rossi holds his lead...Disputed ballot 81 yesterday was cast as a write in for "Christine Rossi". It was counted for Gregoire."

UPDATE 2: King County officials have "discovered" yet another stash of "lost" votes in a warehouse. No chain of custody, of course. It couldn't be used as evidence in court if the police produced something of similarly uncertain provenance. And the courts have authorized only a recount of existing votes, not a re-canvass.

Betsy's Page wonders if a Gregoire steal would be a Pyrrhic victory for the Democrats. If so then Rossi should be preparing to run against Sen. Maria Cantwell, who is up for reelection in 2006. Cantwell has much to lose if Gregoire steals this election, as the outrage over the theft will cause a significant backlash against Democrats in the state. The sympathy factor for Dino Rossi will be through the roof, to Cantwell's detriment if Rossi runs against her.

The GOP is vowing to fight on.

Patrici Ruffini:

This is what's killing us. A hidebound, literalist acceptance of every single rule and procedure when the rulebook was thrown out the window five or six court rulings ago. This process has been hopelessly corrupted ever since a judge issued that first ruling allowing Democrats to rustle up extra votes by campaigning amongst provisional voters. This when all electioneering was supposed to have stopped on November 2nd. We have since seen gross violations by King County officials of all manner of rules concerning the handling and counting of ballots, and the discovery of secret closets stuffed with ballots from selected precincts. The handwriting has been on the wall for weeks, and only now is it considered necessary to make sure every vote for Rossi actually got counted?