After the drawn-out gubernatorial election of 2004, no one in Washington can dispute that the state’s voter-registration system needed repairs.

However, that’s no justification for the recklessness headed our way in the form of a citizens’ initiative requiring all state voters to reregister by producing proof of citizenship and their full legal names.

Those demands sound reasonable, especially if you’re convinced that the polls are overrun by felons, illegal aliens and dead people stuffing ballot boxes with bogus votes. While the heated aftermath of the 2004 election produced insinuations along those lines, no credible evidence backs them up.

True, votes were cast by people who weren’t eligible to cast them. But Chelan County Superior Court Judge John Bridges, who identified 1,678 illegal votes among those cast in the gubernatorial contest, said there was no basis to conclude that they favored either Democrat Chris Gregoire or Republican Dino Rossi.

Bottom line: Error isn’t the same as conspiracy. You wouldn’t know that, however, to hear advocates of the reregistration proposal, Grassroots Washington, a creation of the Evergreen Freedom Foundation.

Evergreen, having pored over the new statewide voter database ordered by federal law, contends that 15 percent of the registrations contain “serious errors.” But Evergreen hasn’t demonstrated how many of those errors amount to improper registrations as opposed to typographical errors or missing information.

Secretary of State Sam Reed, the state’s chief election officer, knows there are errors but is relying on thorough records searches to track down duplications and to identify deceased voters, felons and other problems. That’s the responsible way to do the job.

Grassroots Washington wants to force every Washington voter to reregister, a logistical nightmare for elections offices across the state and a harsh unfairness to many registered voters facing the time, effort and expense of tracking down documentation to satisfy the proposed requirements. What’s more, the initiative would invite an avalanche of litigation.

As King County Superior Court Judge Michael S. Spearman noted in a recent ruling supporting voting rights of felons who have served their prison time but still owe fines, “The right to exercise the franchise has been acknowledged as the right by which all other rights are preserved.”

If the courts will protect some felons’ voting rights, what about people who grew up using a stepfather’s name without legally changing it? What about the voter who’s gone all her life by a name that varies slightly from her birth certificate?

Washington state’s election process spent enough time in court in 2004 and 2005. The voter rolls need to be tidied up, but it’s a job best left in the hands of Reed and the state’s elections officials. The alternative would be chaos.