WENATCHEE — It's unusual, lawyers say, to get to the end of presenting your case and have no idea what the judge thinks of it.

Yet that's the flavor here as the cryptic Judge John Bridges will decide Monday who won the state's 2004 election for governor.

Most judges try not to telegraph how they will rule. But this guy has been as inscrutable as a sphinx.

Even his major rulings this spring, which presumably he meant to be clear, were so ambiguous that lawyers continue to debate them here at the trial's close.

I can't blame him. I've sat through a lot of trials over the years, and this one is as slippery and inconclusive as they come.

Example: This is a trial to find illegal votes and see if they affected the governor's race. With the trial all but over, we still have no clear idea how many illegal votes were cast.

Yesterday, dueling lawyers and statisticians said the number could be as low as 1,419 or as high as 4,534 — prompting exasperation from the judge.

"I am not able to reconcile this. Can you help me?" he said.

No one really can help him. This weekend, he will have to pore through two dozen boxes of evidence and try to answer, alone, some tricky questions.

Such as: Just how messed up was this election? The GOP's strongest argument, by far, is that the sheer number of illegal or questionable ballots made it impossible to determine a winner. They want Bridges to declare the office vacant, setting up a new election either this year or next.

It's true that, say, 3,000 bad ballots is huge compared with Democrat Christine Gregoire's 129-vote margin of victory. Add in King County's mistakes and how some of its elections officials seemed barely competent on the witness stand, and you have a good case for tossing the election.

But it's also true that the bad ballots make up only about 0.1 percent of the 2.9 million cast statewide — meaning 99.9 percent of all votes have never been at issue in this trial. So was this a botched election, or just a close one?

Another option for Bridges is to use a statistical model to subtract illegal votes from both candidates, and, conceivably, anoint Republican Dino Rossi the winner. This seems unlikely, as the judge seems increasingly dubious about the statistics.

Least likely is that he'll void the election because of alleged fraud by King County elections officials. This was the weakest part of the GOP case, and the judge pooh-poohed it.

I can't read the sphinx, but here's what I think he ought to do. He should tell King County to get its act together. He should scold the GOP for making wild allegations.

He should subtract the roughly 1,500 votes that everybody agrees are illegal.

It won't make any difference in the outcome. At which point he should wish the politicians "good luck in 2008" and bring the 2004 election mercifully to an end.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Friday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.