Reply #10: Whether they're repub or dem remains to be determined.... [View All]

[CaptainCorc]

maybe. Here's a link to an article which casts gloom on the prospect of getting those puppies counted. Note that this article is from the 15th and deals with a different court decision. The upshot of it is that the Washington State Supreme Court "rejected a lawsuit that would have required counties to reinspect more than 3,000 previously disqualified absentee and provisional ballots."

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/203826_governor15.html

Another snip:

In rejecting the Democrats' lawsuit yesterday, the high court ruled that under Washington law, "ballots are to be 'retabulated' only if they have been previously counted or tallied."

end snip

Now the word "tallied" is interesting here. I worked a little with Washington state elections and absentee voters are given credit for having voted even if their ballots don't count for some reason. Please don't ask me for the law behind that :). So if those 500 odd ballots have been "tallied" it may be possible that they'll be counted.

snip:

...the justices qualified that part of the ruling. State law also includes a provision that allows counties to fix errors, the justices wrote.

end snip

That seems significant to me because on these 500 odd ballots that were ruled on (negatively) today, the problem was that the election people did not go to the registration cards for signatures LIKE THEY WERE SUPPOSED TO. When they found the signatures were not in the computer database, they rejected the ballots. This, as I understand it, is a procedural error. (If you're confused about all this signature business I beg your pardon: absentee ballots are mailed in a special envelope that the voter signs in order to allow the election workers to compare the signature with one on record--either in a database or on a registration card--in order to verify that the sender is really the voter in question).

Well this has gotten long hasn't it? Sorry about that. :)

Oh and my apologies if I didn't handle the snipping right.