Republican gubernatorial candidate protests election, upset that Democrat allowed to win.

From this story over at Yahoo News:

After three vote tallies and nearly two nerve-racking months of waiting, Democrat Christine Gregoire was declared Washington's governor-elect on Thursday. But her Republican rival did not concede and wants a new election.

Said the Republican candidate Dino Rossi, "We Republicans are disturbed by the obvious implications of what's happened here -- that the voters might get the outrageous and dangerous idea that they're allowed to vote for Democrats and, furthermore, that those Democrats might be allowed to win. This strikes us as a profound assault on what we in the GOP consider a fundamental principle of democracy -- that only Republicans are permitted to be elected to office."

When told that his opponent, Christine Gregoire, was declared the winner after several hundred mysteriously-missing and apparently valid votes turned up, Rossi responded, "Well, that's exactly the kind of thing I was talking about. It's obvious to all of us in the GOP that most elections run far more smoothly if election officials have the right to simply discard hundreds of Democratic votes. If you actually insist on counting everyone's vote, that just forces Republicans to resort to older election strategies, such as ballot box stuffing and rigging electronic voting machines. And I'm sure we can all agree that we don't want to go back to the old days, do we?"

Rossi expressed deep concern about the sort of precedent that would be set by the election. "Sure," said Rossi, "right now, it affects only Washington state. But if the media picks up on this story, other states might get the impression that they're allowed to vote for Democrats as well. And there's no telling what kind of damage that could do to the fabric of the Republic."

In a related development, Republican House Speaker Dennis Hastert promised to fast-track legislation that would allow Democratic votes to be counted as only 3/5 of a Republican vote, and to attach a rider that would allow all registered Democrats to be hunted down with dogs. Incoming Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid of Nevada promised to work with Hastert to pass the legislation in what he called "a spirit of bipartisanship".