While we were away...

...sucking down eggnog and inventorying the holiday plunder, Christine Gregoire became the apparent Governor-elect of Washington, taking a 130 vote lead in the hand recount that concluded when King County reported its final figures on Thursday.

I say apparent because the state hasn't certified the count yet and the state Republicans have "...vowed to seek out Rossi voters whose ballots were disqualified and said they will fight to have those votes counted."

Good luck to them, I suppose, but time is tight, and it's doubtful that they can find enough truly valid ballots within those previously disqualified to make up the difference. If they can do that before the certification, well, fair enough. As Kos rightly notes, only Republicans think valid votes shouldn't be counted.

It's not as though they didn't find a few new votes of their own during the recount process, though. Timothy Killian at More Perfect did the math and found that...

...guess what? King County wasn't the lead vote finder. Nor were they second. Or third. Or even fourth, fifth or sixth. Nope. The top six counties to add votes to their final tallies were counties that Dino Rossi won.

In fact, among counties that added votes to their previous totals during the recount, nine of the top ten, by percentage of votes cast, were Rossi counties. It really looks like he's already sifted the voter roles for everything available.

It's done, folks. Time to make it official and move on. In some earlier comments, it was noted that Republican Secretary of State Sam Reed seemed to have put himself on the right side of counting all the votes in King County. I'm not sure how much praise he actually merits for simply following the election law of the state, but compared to some of his compatriots across the country, in Florida, say, or Ohio, he is somewhat remarkable that regard I suppose.

Still, a better measure of his fairness will be in how quickly he now moves to certify the election of Governor Gregoire and to short circuit Republican maneuvers to manufacture votes or further disrupt the ballot via the courts.