Washington has had a count in the race for governor.

Washington has had a machine recount.

Now, on the third try – a hand re-recount – Washington has discovered 561 ballots in King County that weren’t counted at all.

Something in the machinery of county election offices around the state is messed up enough to affect the closest governor’s race in state history. As a result, state Republicans claim the Democrats are trying to steal the election for their candidate, Christine Gregoire, who continues to trail Republican Dino Rossi by fewer than 100 votes after a week of the statewide re-recount. And Democrats are convinced that uneven procedures and mistakes by election workers have so polluted the 2004 race that they asked the state Supreme Court to order election officials to reconsider thousands of ballots that had been ruled invalid.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court sidestepped legal chaos by ruling unanimously against the Democrats’ request Tuesday. State law makes it clear, they said, that a recount should “retabulate” votes already counted and that county canvassing boards can’t be forced to look at ballots that have been rejected in the first two counts. The Democrats, however, have a point that consistent procedures are needed in county courthouses statewide to ensure, as much as possible, that every legal ballot is counted.

Even before the King County snafu produced hundreds of extra ballots, the hand recount had found reason to question results in a state election system judged by a research group as one of the best in the nation. In a story earlier this month, Richard Roesler of The Spokesman-Review reported that Whatcom County had found seven unopened ballots that had been placed in the wrong pile more than a month earlier. In Mason County, 23 ballots were improperly rejected. Skamania County found four ballots that should have been counted. The list goes on.

None of the other counties can touch the missteps in King County.

Rossi saw his initial 261-vote victory drop to 42 votes in the machine recount, chiefly because King County found almost 1,000 uncounted ballots. Now, King County has found 561 absentee ballots that should have been checked manually for proper signatures but were inadvertently placed in a wrong pile. Those ballots could push Gregoire over the top in her bid to catch Rossi. Angry GOP Chairman Chris Vance wondered if the King County discoveries were the result of “gross incompetence or blatant voter fraud.”

We don’t see gross incompetence or voter fraud – just human error produced by frazzled election officials, faced with the daunting task of counting nearly 900,000 ballots. Usually, such an error wouldn’t make a difference. In this race, however, everything is magnified.

Washington can learn from the problems uncovered by the third count. Above all, the Legislature, in cooperation with county election officials, should legislate uniform rules for recounts that would further reduce the chance of human error in tight contests.