If the Democrats were true to their concern that EVERY vote be counted, then why wouldn’t they want ALL the ballots in the state to be manually recounted? Wouldn’t their demand for a manual recount in only select counties show their partiality to voters in King County and other Gregoire-leaning counties over all the other counties in the state? These kinds of tough questions might be avoidable if they simply plead that they are lacking the funds to pay for a statewide manual recount.

Comes now today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer, containing an article hinting that the state’s Democratic Party might not have the funds to ask for a statewide recount. Democratic Spokeswoman Kirstin Brost indicates that the party is nowhere close enough to having the $700,000 that would need to be forked over up-front for the statewide manual recount.

Then again, aside from avoiding PR fallout, nothing short of a statewide manual recount would give Gregoire a victory. A victory for Gregoire in a partial recount would trigger a taxpayer-funded statewide recount, and result in a refund to the state Democratic Party of the funds they would expend on the partial recount. So it would seem that the Democratic Party has nothing (nefarious) to gain by requesting only a partial recount.

Nonetheless, the PR fallout of requesting only a partial recount shouldn’t be so easily discounted from the Democrats' calculus. They have been at great pains to try to proclaim themselves the champions of "count every vote." Requesting only a partial recount could seriously damage their claims in this regard. The irony in all of this was noted by former governor Dan Evans, who stated in the same P-I article that:

We are getting to the point where apparently the Gregoire campaign wants to pick and choose the areas where they count...They are not interested in an accurate count; they are interested in some combination of circumstances that might put their candidate ahead, that's all.

Gov. Evans worried that we were heading down a dangerous path. He puts no stock in Gregoire’s claims about accurate counts: "Everybody seems to think that a hand count is the ultimate in accuracy, and I don't think that's even remotely close to the truth." Instead, Gov. Evans worried that this would just open the door to more lawyering and litigation over the election. The words of Gov. Evans may be precisely what the Gregoire folks fear at this moment.

However, as a Seattle Times article from today points out: “The Democratic Governors' Association, EMILY's List and the Democratic National Committee are expected to provide financial help.” If these special interest groups can give the state Democratic Party sufficient funds, maybe they will request a statewide manual recount before Friday’s deadline, after all. Of course, a manual recount courtesy of the Dems’ favorite special interest groups doesn’t sound like a PR boon to the state Democratic Party, either. But a manual recount brought to us by EMILY’s List doesn’t appear to so clearly fly in the face of the Democrats' previous talking points about counting every vote accurately.

(Hat tip to Politicalities for the head's up on the P-I article.)