UPDATE! This post has been updated!

First off, Norah O'Donnell is a moron.

Evidence:

The lawsuit stemmed from my December 2004 request for a list of all voters who voted in the November 2004 election. The county did not satisfy my request in full until January 2007.

The documents that they eventually provided to me revealed that county election officials unlawfully counted hundreds of ineligible ballots in the 2004 election: a multiple of Christine Gregoire's 133-vote "margin of victory" over Dino Rossi in the contested gubernatorial race. Documentation of these illegal votes was withheld from discovery in the election contest trial and not released to me until months after the trial. Consequently, the trial was conducted in ignorance of these potentially outcome-changing illegal votes.

Additional documents that were released last month in discovery for my case confirmed that county officials both knew more about the illegal vote counting than they had previously acknowledged, and also knowingly withheld responsive documents from me during 2005 and 2006.

Good for Sharkansky, bad for democracy.

UPDATE!

A couple of additional notes on Sharkansky's work over at SoundPolitics.com:

• Sharkansky did research that no Washington State newspaper bothered to do. I've little doubt that had the Seattle Times, Seattle P-I or any other paper done what Sharkansky did, not only would they have been able to get the documents in a far more timely manner -- because they can apply far more public pressure than a lone blogger -- but they'd probably have earned a Pulitzer Prize.
• While Sharkansky's work was done before the Pulitzers were open to online-only publications, it doesn't explain why he never received First Amendment and public records awards typically given out by groups like the ACLU or even the Washington Coalition for Open Government.