Is a recount a recount if it includes votes that have never been counted? That’s the issue the Washington state Supreme Court has agreed to take up on Monday, when it will hear arguments from the Democratic Party’s lawyers that the rules for the manual recount should be different from the machine recount.

The Democratic Party has filed a lawsuit that would’ve never been filed if the race for governor were not so close. It wants counties to reconsider ballots that were rejected by county canvassing boards, claiming that human error was possible. Error is always possible and is likely to occur during the manual recount, but that didn’t stop Democrats from requesting one.

The focal point of the court case is whether provisional and absentee ballots were properly rejected. There are several reasons such ballots aren’t counted, chief among them: The signature on the envelope does not match the signature on file at county offices and the voter isn’t registered.

Four years ago, the state did not have consistent rules in place for such matters. Counties had varying standards for determining the validity of a signature or dealing with hanging chads. The state reformed its vote counting rules in 2001 after watching the debacle in Florida. Today, the rules in each county are consistent. Counties now adhere to the rule that two letters in a signature must be a match and two corners of a chad must be detached from a punch-card ballot to be counted.

If the rules are unfair, the time to have challenged them was before an election not during one. We think they are fair.

County elections officials – even those in Democratic-leaning counties – say they don’t think they have the authority under state law to review rejected ballots another time. If the court intervenes and interprets the law differently, then the rules will have been changed during an election. Such a change would have dire consequences for this election and beyond.

In this election, a rule change would drag matters into January. And if the outcome were flipped, it would probably trigger lawsuits that would turn this into a federal case. Plus, the “winner” would be under a constant cloud of legitimacy. The divisiveness would be crippling for the entire state.

Court intervention would also set a precedent for taking all close counts to judges, because contestants would know that the rules can always be rewritten.

The best course is for the state Supreme Court to stay out of the matter and let the election be decided by consistent, unswerving guidelines.