Houston Democrats

Rossi and the GOP sued in the Chelan County Superior Court to overturn the governor's race, the closest in the nation's history. Gregoire won by 129 votes after a hand recount of more than 2.8 million ballots.

And just a touch of irony from all the GOP efforts:

But after spending millions of dollars, months on investigations and two weeks in trial, the net result for the Republicans today was that Rossi lost four votes from his total, pushing Gregoire's margin to 133.

Bridges turned back the GOP challenge on several fronts. He said the Republicans' claims of fraud were not supported by any evidence. He rebuffed their statistical proposal for subtracting invalid votes from the candidates, calling it scientifically inadequate. And he rejected their suggested interpretations of state laws and previous court rulings on election challenges.

"This court is not in a position to fix the deficiencies in the elections process that we heard about in the courtroom," he said.

[...]

And later, he said the chief principle governing elections court cases is judicial restraint: "Unless an election is clearly invalid, when the people have spoken, their verdict should not be disturbed by the courts."

If the voters don't like how elections are handled, the judge said, they should send a message through the ballot box to their legislators and county officials.

Read more from the complete article in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.