The good...

More votes will be counted.

OLYMPIA Five hundred sixty-one valid absentee ballots that had been erroneously rejected have been discovered in heavily Democratic King County, buoying Christine Gregoire's hopes of prevailing in a hand recount of the governor's race.

...the bad. Some votes may not be.

....the county would not reconsider nearly 2,000 other absentee and provisional ballots that were ruled invalid unless ordered to do so by the Supreme Court.

...the ugly. Some people are pulling out all the stops to keep some votes from counting.

Hours later, lawyers for the county, the state and Republican Gov.-elect Dino Rossi appeared before the state Supreme Court to argue that counties should not be required to reinspect roughly 3,000 rejected ballots for the hand recount that began last week.

And for folks out there who think it's chic to support a couple Republicans in down-ballot races to demonstrate 'independence,' keep this in mind.

"The place to change their recount statute is the Legislature, not here," Thomas Ahearne, a lawyer for Republican Secretary of State Sam Reed, told the court. "The time to change the recount statute is before the election, not in the middle of the ongoing recount."

So, all those folks who voted for President Kerry and Senator Murray and Democratic members of the House and Democratic Majorities in the State House and State Senate but also voted for Sam Reed, and there were a bunch of you, please form a line to the, well, in the center, I guess, to explain to those 2,000 King County voters why their ballots shouldn't be counted.

Ohio, Florida, Washington...anybody heard of this kind of nonsense in a state where a Democrat runs the elections procedures?

"Non-partisan" doesn't mean "independent." It means, ultimately that you're on their side.

And they're wrong.