You'll have to forgive me for consistently returning to the mess that is the elections department in King County, Washington. It's not that I expect Gov. Christine Gregoire to feel a sudden onset of remorse, knowing that officials in the state's most populous county broke numerous election laws to ensure her narrow victory. The 2004 gubernatorial election is over and the books are closed on it.

No, I keep returning to the goings-on in King County because the laws continue to be flouted by Democrat apparatchiks who are interested only in keeping enough illegal voters on the rolls so that they can mine them for the necessary votes in a close race.

Earlier this week, Stefan Sharkansky, who has been carrying on in the tradition of muckraking journalists of old, exposed the King County canvassing board's refusal to invalidate illegal voter registrations that identified the individual's home as a little, tiny rented mailbox in a storefront.

Now, it is possible to have your absentee ballot and other voting-related materials sent to one of these rented mailbox and still have your residence listed as, well, the place where you actually live.

Unfortunately, more than 1,000 registered voters still chose to register illegally.

When challenged, the Democrats on the canvassing board seized on one man's testimony that he was sleeping in a UPS Store after it closed at night (the mailbox area is accessible 24 hours) and that the rented mailbox was therefore his residence. Apparently there are a lot of people who do that, because the Democrats used that story to refuse to invalidate hundreds of other illegal registrations.

As with all things, the mailbox voters are a diverse lot. For every guy who sleeps in the UPS store, you've got another who is lead singer of the grunge-rock band Pearl Jam -- Eddie Vedder.

There is a serious problem with the elections department in King County and, allowed to fester, it has the possibility of affecting national elections. It may not have affected the 2004 presidential race, but there's a good chance, in hindsight, that it was the difference in the 2000 Washington Senate race narrowly won by Democrat Maria Cantwell over incumbent Slade Gorton.

What happens in Washington State can have an impact 3,000 miles away in Washington, D.C. That's why it's important not to dismiss what continues to occur in the Great Northwest as merely bad blood from the 2004 gubernatorial race. What is happening there is nothing less than blatant corruption and vote-rigging that only Jimmy Carter would find to be acceptable.