Vote-counting mischief in Washington’s GOP primary?

from The Carpetbagger Report

By Saturday night, John McCain had already experienced a pretty rough day. He’d been trounced by Mike Huckabee in the Kansas caucuses, and then learned he’d been beaten handily in Louisiana GOP primary. In Washington state, which was supposed to be a far easier win for the Arizona senator, McCain was trailing Huckabee for part of the night, but with 87% of the precincts reporting, McCain had a narrow lead, which was less than two percentage points.

That’s when it got a little odd. Election watchers kept an eye on the results, waiting for additional precincts to report, and wondering whether McCain’s narrow lead would evaporate. The funny thing was, additional precincts didn’t report. Despite the narrow margin, and with plenty of votes left to go, the state Republican Party stopped counting and declared McCain the winner.

As Josh Marshall noted yesterday:

Now, I think it would be borderline for a media organization to declare one candidate a winner when the margin separating first and second was 1.8% with 13% of the results still uncounted. But for the officials holding the election to declare the result on that basis is simply bizarre. But that’s what they did.

Josh certainly isn’t the only one to find the events unusual. On “Meet the Press” yesterday, Huckabee argued that the Washington state caucuses were “still too close to call.” When Russert responded, “Well, the party has declared it over,” Huckabee said, “They have, but there’s some weird things.”

So weird, in fact, that the Huckabee campaign is sending in the lawyers.

(More here.)