All Over, Including The Counting, In Washington

This is a very weird story. So the primary coverage was bouncing along Saturday, with Mike Huckabee trouncing John McCain in Kansas and winning a squeaker in Louisiana. The race in Washington appeared to be going down to the wire, too. And then... the Washington GOP just stopped counting and gave McCain the victory. Leading to this exchange between the head of the state GOP and Huckabee's lawyer (and his daughter-in-law):

Finally, Luke Esser, the chair of the state GOP party, returned the Huckabee campaign's call, saying the final results would be determined sometime within the week.

The only hitch? The state chairman had already declared John McCain the winner last night, with only a 242 vote lead. In a written statement last night, Esser said, “Congratulations to Sen. McCain for a hard-fought win, his second caucus victory in the 2008 presidential nomination process. And congratulations to Gov. Huckabee for his strong second-place finish.”

Huckabee campaign lawyer Lauren Huckabee (daughter-in-law of the candidate), who is skeptical of the fairness, asked for a lawyer to monitor the resluts.

The state GOP denied the request and hung up on Lauren Huckabee, according to the campaign. Campaign adviser Ed Rollins will be sending lawyers to Olympia, scheduled to land this evening, to investigate the matter.

At a hastily arranged press conference in a hotel room, Rollins was steamed.

“You don’t get to announce the votes until they are all counted. And obviously, by his attempts to project without any statistical data or even if he had statistical data, it’s irrelevant: we’re entitled to a fair, full count," Rollins said.

"Our lawyers attempted to contact him today, finally did so about ten minutes ago. He said, ‘Well I don’t know where the precincts, are, I just sort of did it. How dare Mike Huckabee challenge – he has to trust us. We’re going to count the rest of the votes today in the office.’"

"We asked to have someone go in to the office with them and count the votes and he refused us. He said he would have to notify the other campaigns."

Huckabee called it Soviet-style tactics and he's not wrong. The Republican Party is a top-down establishment outfit, and they clearly have an interest in wrapping up their race with the utmost speed. But stopping the counting? McCain is playing dumb about it and trying to say "trust the state GOP," but it's kind of hard to do so when they shut down the election and declare a winner before all the votes are in.