Conservatives Can't Even Rig An Election Properly

So let's say you're head of the Washington Republican Party (and really, who amongst us hasn't been?) and you're a supporter of John McCain. He's winning your state's caucus as the votes come in and most of the votes are in, and things look good. But Mike Huckabee is getting awful close. Why not just stop reporting the vote? If McCain is ahead, he'll stay that way and who'll notice? Well, that's what did happen last weekend it seems and as it turns out someone did notice [1]--the good people at Talking Points Memo:

For probably the first time in all the primaries and elections I've ever watched, the folks running the election decided to stop counting the votes with 13% of the votes uncounted. And this wasn't a 70-30 blow out, but a tight race where the two top vote getters were separated by less than 2% of the vote. Then this morning, state party chair Luke Esser decided to declare McCain the winner.

But it turns out to be even worse. The state GOP hadn't really decided [2] how the votes were counted:

At a minimum, there seems to be serious questions about what exactly was being tallied Saturday night. Was it the presidential preferences of individual caucusgoers, which Snohomish County apparently counted? Or was it the presidential preferences of the delegates elected by caucus-goers, which the party says should have been counted?

Setting aside the issue of why Esser, the state GOP chair, called the contest for John McCain even before all the caucuses had reported, there seems to be an issue of whether everyone was even counting the same thing.

Can we agree that any election is bound to have some problems if the people running the election haven't agreed on what is being counted?

And, just to make things extra fun, here's an account of the suspicious rapidity with McCain jumped into the lead as results came in.

To summarize, they ran the caucuses contrary to their own rules, possibly fiddled with the results of those caucuses (remember the party ran this election not the state) and then just stopped reporting the results at all once they had their desired result. And we wonder why conservatives have trouble governing...