[chimera]

Republicans won the war, why get hysterical trying to refight a skirmish, especially when the Republican SoS did his best to follow the letter of the law?

Because it is generally a good policy to confront and stand against evil whenever and wherever you encounter it. Running away always encourages evil. If people had paid attention to Hitler at Nuremberg, we might, just might, have been spared 50 million or so deaths.

Gregoire and the 'Rats stole this election in the most brazen, in-your-face manner possible. If we don't confront evil and unfairness when it is present before our eyes, in the light of day, can we lay any claim to being able to fight it anywhere? There are a few good conservatives left in the state of WA. They are outgunned and outnumbered but are doing their best, within the rules, to stand up for themselves, their beliefs, and their candidate. For that, they deserve our support and encouragement, not denigration.

[supercat]

Gregoire and the 'Rats stole this election in the most brazen, in-your-face manner possible.

One problem with the election system in its current form is that many people don't mind having their election officials cheat in their favor. The people who object to election officials' behavior aren't in a position to vote for or against those officials, so the officials don't have to worry about what they think.

I would therefore suggest this for a reform:

1. Require each precinct to keep its ballots and tallies separate and never co-mingle them. Use machine-separable ballots for different precincts to prevent accidental comingling (if two precincts have ballot boxes at the same polling place, program the ballot boxes to reject ballots for the wrong precinct).
2. Explicitly state in law that if the total number of 'fishy' ballots in precincts which gave the majority of their votes to the election winner exceeds the winner's margin of victory, the loser may demand a revote.
3. If a revote is required per (2), the costs of it shall be assessed to election officials' sponsoring jurisdictions in proportion to the total number of fishy ballots for which they are responsible (regardless of which candidate received the majority of votes in those jurisdictions), up to a maximum of $10,000 per vote.

In the short term, this might end up causing an excessive number of revote elections. In the longer term, however, it shouldn't since election officials would pretty quickly learn to clean up their act.

Voters may not mind an election official who gets away with fudging things in their favor, but nobody's going to like an election official whose fudging causes elections to get thrown out--especially if they have to pay for it.