An excellent entry, promoted to the Daily Kos front page from a diary entry.

Update: So I don't know why I have to be the one imagining this, but this is what an Ohio Democratic Party lawyer should be saying to a state judge ASAP:

Your honor, the Ohio Democratic Party requires that every ballot be counted in this election, even if that means doing so by hand. This was an extremely close election. Current numbers show President Bush ahead of Senator Kerry by 136,483 votes. But Ohio has 11,360 precincts.

That's a margin of twelve votes per precinct. If just seven ballots in each precinct were counted for President Bush but should have been counted for Senator Kerry, the entire national election ends differently than we believe. And that's not even including 155,428 uncounted provisional ballots, or addressing as many as 125,000 "spoiled" ballots that could have a valid presidential choice but were simply unread by the machines.

Even if we do not expect the outcome of this race to change, and we remind you that Senator Kerry has conceded, we still must count every vote. We must know who these provisional balloters chose, and why they were provisional instead of standard ballots. We must find out if spoiled ballots disproprotionately favor one candidate over another. We must know where in Ohio people had trouble voting, and figure out why.

This is merely part of a statewide ODP initiative that will also focus on investigating why urban voters had to wait in line, in the rain, for up to six hours to vote, while rural voters had no such problems.

Given the acrimonious state of national politics for the past four years, this nation cannot afford another four years of speculation about who "really" won this election. We already see theories that since exit polls showed Senator Kerry winning Ohio, but that his ballot counts do not match the exit polls in areas where there are many provisional or spoiled ballots, that the election was "stolen" from him. No matter if you believe this or not, we have the means right now to answer that question definitively

If President Bush has won our state's electors, let there be no doubt. If there are flaws in our voting system, we must count the provisional and spoiled ballots to find and fix them. The state legislature cannot address voting irregularites that are never discovered, and every Ohioan deserves the right to have his or her vote counted.

The ODP cannot set legislative priorities for making ballot access easier for all Ohioans without knowing what, if anything, went wrong on November 2. To that end, both the ODP and the equal protection clause of the Constitution require that every ballot be counted, by hand if necessary. It is so important to our legislative agenda that if the recount does not change the outcome of the election, the ODP will happily reimburse the state for the cost of the recount as determined by this court.

We must know how people voted and, if it didn't count, why not. There is no other choice for our great state.

Or something like that.

So if the GOP is so busily trumpeting how wrong the exit polls were about those states that Kerry was supposed to win but apparently did not, why are they so cocksure that the exit polls telling them that "moral values" were a top issue were correct?

It was the same poll, people. If it's wrong in the big part, why is it right in the small part?