That's it? That's all you've got?

After coming into court and saying government officials perpetrated "sinister fraud" to steal the 2004 governor's election, Republicans have finished backing up that claim in the trial in Wenatchee. Their fraud claim, supposedly based on statistical science, wouldn't earn a passing grade on the 10th-grade WASL.

GOP lawyer Dale Foreman told me earlier this week that when I saw the circumstantial evidence of fraud, there would be no doubt in my mind that "somebody was messing with the ballots."

Now that I've seen the evidence, there's no doubt in my mind Republicans ought to be ashamed of themselves.

They've shown plenty of evidence that this election was badly marred by mistakes. But they should retract their bogus fraud allegation, immediately and publicly.

The claim that the vote was stolen is no more than a conspiracy theory tarted up with statistics.

The GOP presented data showing discrepancies in absentee-ballot counts from 11 King County precincts.

In some precincts, the county tallied more mail-in ballots than there were voters recorded as having voted by mail. In others, the opposite occurred: The county recorded more voters than ballots.

The proof that ballots were fabricated for Democrats, the GOP says, is that four of the five precincts with the most excess mail-in ballots backed Democrat Christine Gregoire. And the proof that ballots were misplaced or destroyed to harm Republicans is that four of the six precincts in which the most mail-in votes can't be accounted for backed Republican Dino Rossi.

"This is a pattern, and there can be no explanation for it other than somebody was manipulating the ballot box," Foreman said.

There is another explanation, which is that the analysis makes such leaps of logic that it never should have been presented in court.

These are mail-in ballots. They did not pass through the chaotic polling places. They were handled and counted at central King County facilities.

If you were working at one of these county facilities and you wanted to fabricate or destroy ballots to aid Gregoire, what difference would it make how the voters in the rest of that precinct had voted?

Suppose you wanted to pick 10 Rossi votes off the mail-in ballot pile and shred them. You could just as logically pick from a precinct in which the votes were split 50-50 between the candidates. Or 60-40. Or 40-60.

Even if you go down the GOP's rabbit hole, the rest of the data — the part they didn't share in court — don't support their own theory. For example, there were 703 King County precincts in which there were more absentee voters than ballots, not just six. The GOP said in court that ballots were undercounted mostly in precincts that backed Rossi, but 500 of these 703 precincts — 71 percent — actually backed Gregoire.

What the GOP has done is irrationally link two quantities — the accounting of mail-in ballot discrepancies in a precinct and which candidate that precinct supported.

It's the only evidence they're offering that the election was stolen. And it's apropos of nothing.

"Do I have a theory? No," said GOP attorney Mark Braden. "I don't know how it happened. I do not know why we have a nonrandom pattern."

Maybe because you saw only what you wanted to see?

Of all the outrages in this election, this fraud claim is the most cynical.

This is no longer about spinning at news conferences. The GOP went into court and made a serious, damaging charge. They can't back it up, yet they intend to let it fester, leaving the impression the vote really was stolen.

Makes you wonder whether that was a goal of this trial all along.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday.

Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.