As I wrote in the previous post, I wouldn’t be surprised if WA-08 ends up in a recount. And we all know what happened the last time we had one of those.
So I’m particularly wary about allowing the conspiracy theorists to get their frame established before the rest of us realize there’s anything to theorize about. Take for example this little paranoid fantasy my new beer buddy Stefan tossed off late election night, almost as an aside:
I heard a story from an informed source that someone walked into a polling place in Bellevue and stuffed a bunch of “flood ballots” into an Accuvote. They have lawyers looking into this.
Hmm. Stefan doesn’t tell us exactly what his source is informed by, but it doesn’t seem to be reality. As KCRE spokesperson Bobbie Egan points out in Stefan’s own comment thread, a so-called “flood ballot” is merely a plain paper printout of a sample ballot on King County’s web page, and as such:
There is no way for ballot tabulation equipment to count a simple Web page. Only a ballot, properly programmed for the specific election by King County Elections could be read by the equipment.
I’d wager that a slight majority of Washingtonians still believe that Democrats likely stole the governor’s mansion from Dino Rossi, a bullshit misconception built entirely of tiny little turd pellets of untruth like this one. Left unrefuted, public opinion gets shaped by a “where there’s smoke there’s fire” mentality. Two years ago the PR war was pretty much over before most of us knew it had started, but KCRE seems to have learned its lesson — it is very heartening to see Egan proactively refuting even the stupidest rumors.