Election rigging -- it's not just something to use against Democrats anymore and other election stories

Something is rotten in the state of Washington:

The Huckabee Presidential Campaign will be exploring all available legal options regarding the dubious final results for the state of Washington State Republican precinct caucuses, it was announced today. Campaign Chairman Ed Rollins issued the following statement:

“The Huckabee campaign is deeply disturbed by the obvious irregularities in the Washington State Republican precinct caucuses. It is very unfortunate that the Washington State Party Chairman, Luke Esser, chose to call the race for John McCain after only 87 percent of the vote was counted. According to CNN, the difference between Senator McCain and Governor Huckabee is a mere 242 votes, out of more than 12,000 votes counted—with another 1500 or so votes, apparently, not counted. That is an outrage.

“In other words, more than one in eight Evergreen State Republicans have been disenfranchised by the actions of their own party. This was an error in judgment by Mr. Esser. It was Mr. Esser’s duty to oversee a fair vote-count process. Washington Republicans know, from bitter experience in the 2004 gubernatorial election, the terrible results that can come from bad ballot-counting.

“Frankly, I am disappointed in the way that Mr. Esser has handled this urgent matter. So I call upon Mr. Esser and his colleagues to cooperate fully with the Huckabee campaign—and all Republicans, everywhere, who care about honest and transparent vote-counting—to make sure that every vote is counted and that all Republicans in Washington have the chance to make their votes count. Attempts by our campaign to contact Mr. Esser have been unsuccessful. Our lawyers will be on the ground in Washington State soon, and we look forward to sitting down with Mr. Esser to evaluate this process, to see why the count took so long, and why the vote-counting was stopped prematurely.

“It would be a disservice to every voter in Washington State to not pursue a full accounting of all votes cast.

“This is not about Mike Huckabee. This is not about Senator John McCain. This is about the failings of the Washington State Republican Party. All Republicans should unite to demand an honest accounting of the votes, so that Republicans can have full confidence in the results, and full confidence in the eventual Republican nominee.

Indeed. Brad Friedman has more on this attempt to wrap up the Republican nomination now.

This is getting interesting now. Both parties seem to be in complete disarray. The Republicans have three candidates left. The frontrunner is loathed by the xenophobic wing of the Republican party that has the gasbags of wingnut talk radio as its mouthpiece. The runner-up insurgent has become beloved by the Christofascist Zombie Brigade(™ Marc Maron) but is loathed by the Big Money wing of the Republican Party because he's all, like in favor of being nice to the poor an' stuff. And then there's Ron Paul, the crazy uncle in the attic. And now we're seeing the same kind of crap going on in the Republican primaries that we saw in New Hampshire.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton, after not just losing all three states that voted yesterday, but losing them in spectacular fashion, has fired her campaign manager. And while he hasn't trounced Hillary Clinton by quite as much in the Maine caucuses, he's won with a decisive 15% margin of victory there too, in one of the whitest states in the country. Meanwhile John Edwards is talking with both candidates, and they sure do want his endorsement. Watch Barack Obama at the Virginia Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner last night and tell me if what he says about health care and corporate profits doesn't sound a wee bit familiar:

I'm not sure how big an impact an Edwards endorsement is going to have either way. Most Edwards supporters, except the die-hards who have spent the last two weeks or so parsing the meaning of "suspended" and joining forces with the pipe dreamers who are still hoping that a brokered convention will end with Al Gore as the compromise candidate, have already lined up with their backup candidate. If Edwards should endorse Hillary Clinton, I'll be extremely disappointed, not because his endorsement decides whom I'm supporting, but because she seems so antithetical to everything his campaign was about. I will never forget the way she got up to a booing audience at Yearly Kos last summer and insisted that corporate lobbyists are Americans too. It's one thing to rally around the eventual nominee; it would be quite another to endorse a candidate at this stage of the game who has been so unrepentant about her warmongering and her embrace of corporate lobbyists.

I don't think I've ever seen an election season in which both parties were as soundly turned on their ear. A year ago, the punditocracy was looking forward to the inevitable Hillary vs. McCain race; the restoration of the Clintons vs. the dream deferred of the man whose hopes were broken in South Carolina eight years ago. And now all the prognostication in the world isn't telling them how all this is going to shake out.

If it weren't the future of our very Constitution at stake, it would be entertaining. But between behind-the-scenes machinations of superdelegates, and a voting system that's a complete botch job, we might as well be a banana republic.