Believe it or not, the race for governor in Washington state is still undecided. Democrat Christine Gregoire and Republican Dino Rossi have traded the lead four times since Election Day as election officials keep adding in tens of thousands of absentee and provisional ballots at a pop. There are nearly 22,000 ballots yet to count, including some 10,000 more ballots in King County than local officials had estimated just a couple of days ago. This “find” was good news for Gregoire, who trails Rossi in most of the state but is strong in traditionally Democratic Seattle. The current count has Rossi in the lead by 236 votes out of 2.8 million cast. Washington hasn’t elected a Republican governor in about a quarter of a century.

Right now, both parties are scouring the list of voters whose provisional or absentee ballots were rejected for technicalities, such as missing or apparently mismatched signatures. Then they are knocking on the voters’ doors and asking them to swear out affidavits to try to get their rejected ballots counted. The Democrats just delivered a stack of such affidavits to election officials yesterday.

Remember that Congress enacted a federal law after the Florida debacle requiring states to make greater use of provisional ballots. That was supposed to “fix” things. Uh-huh.