Seattle blogger Stefan Sharkansky on voting irregularities their Governor’s race:

Christine Gregoire has said that our recent election was “a model to the rest of the nation and the world.” If what she meant is that the King County Elections Office is her model of how she plans to run the state of Washington, then we should all be worried.
Is it really “good enough for government work” to count 3,500 or 2,000 more ballots than there were voters? The airlines figured out years ago how to match the number of boarding passes with the number of people sitting in the airplane. Why can’t our elections officials match the number of ballots cast with the number of voters who supposedly cast them?
I think most Washingtonians agree that it isn’t good enough for government work to decide an election by a box load of funny votes. It is not the American way for a tainted victory of 129 votes, marred by thousands of illegitimate votes, including double voters, felon voters, cemetery voters and unidentified voters, to take the place of a legitimate decision of the electorate.

Greg Borowski has a useful followup to recent discussions on Milwaukee’s unusual election numbers today:

At issue is a gap between the city’s estimate of 84,000 election-day registrants and 73,079 verification cards that were sent, as required by law.
Local bloggers and others, including talk radio hosts, have labeled the gap as evidence of more than 10,000 illegally cast ballots.
Stone has stopped short of calling the ballots fraudulent but said “it casts doubt over the 10,000 votes, who cast the 10,000 votes, where those people live and whether they were eligible to vote in the city of Milwaukee.”

More on Madison’s numbers:

In Madison, the city clerk’s office doesn’t keep a tally of same-day registrants whose addresses could not be verified. In the November election, 17,467 people registered at the polls, but city officials have no idea how many of those addresses could be verified, said Sharon Christensen, deputy city clerk.