Election 2004 Denouement…

…is still taking place in Washington state, where hopeful Democrats are claiming that Christine Gregoire will beat Dino Rossi by eight votes to become governor.

"We are absolutely confident that she is going to be the next governor of the state of Washington," [state Democratic Party chair Paul] Berendt said….

King County elections officials said Berendt's victory claim was premature and that the data the parties are seeing hasn't been reconciled….

King County will be the last of Washington's 39 counties to report results in the hand recount of 2.8 million votes.

If Gregoire does win the statewide hand recount, it will mark an incredible turnaround for the attorney general.

She had faced pressure to concede after losing the original tally by 261 votes and the mandatory machine recount by 42 votes.

In the hand recount, Rossi was leading by 49 votes with only King County left to report its results, which consist of about 900,000 ballots.

Whole thing here, courtesy of Freedom News Daily.

Well, whoever actually gets certified the victor, I think we're all winners when an election comes down to someone named Gregoire vs. someone named Rossi. And certainly it's time to remember that apres the 2000 election, politics is as much about epistemology as it is anything else, a swinging scene out of Blowup for god's sake.