Have the spinners gotten dizzy?

The Washington State Supreme Court has ruled that the overlooked ballots in the gubernatorial race that I referred to on Sunday should be counted.

The issue arose because in the course of doing a hand recount, officials in King County found a few hundred ballots that had been wrongly rejected because of a computer glitch. As a result, election workers looked to see if there were other missed ballots and found 150 which had not been counted at all in a warehouse. The Republicans, whose candidate was ahead, argued that a recount should only include votes counted the first time. They got a temporary injunction against counting them, but that has now been tossed out by the state Supreme Court, which found, properly in my view, that the damage to voters who would be disenfranchised outweighed any "damage" to the GOPper candidate that could result in their being counted.

King County is a Democratic stronghold in Washington, so the inclusion of those ballots is expected to help the Democratic candidate in the recount of this extremely close election: Election day totals had the GOPper winning by 261 votes out of 2.9 million cast. A machine recount cut that lead to 42 votes - and the Dems are claiming that even without the 150 disputed votes, they won the recount by eight - yes, eight - votes.