The story in the Washington state GOP caucus just gets weirder and weirder. Click the link to read the latest saga. Here’s a teaser:

According to Esser, sometime overnight Esser did some sort of back of the envelope statistical analysis of the the margin of McCain’s lead (1.8%) and the number votes left uncounted (13%) and decided that Huckabee didn’t have a chance and he’d shut the thing down and declare McCain the winner.

They have quotes to back that up, so it’s not creative license with the story. The state GOP chair really said he was confident in the outcome, so he decided to announce it. If I were a GOP member in WA, I’d be a little pissed off right now.

Oh boy. Statement from Huckabee’s campaign chair, Ed Rollins:

“The Huckabee campaign is deeply disturbed by the obvious irregularities in the Washington State Republican precinct caucuses. It is very unfortunate that the Washington State Party Chairman, Luke Esser, chose to call the race for John McCain after only 87 percent of the vote was counted. According to CNN, the difference between Senator McCain and Governor Huckabee is a mere 242 votes, out of more than 12,000 votes counted—with another 1500 or so votes, apparently, not counted. That is an outrage.

Yeah, I’d say it is an outrage, too.

I was confused as to why CNN.com didn’t have 100% (or 99%) for Washington State. It’s been at 87% of the precincts counted since last night. This explains why CNN.com hasn’t updated: the state GOP hasn’t released any more vote totals but then proceeded to declare McCain the winner. I’m with Josh Marshall: it’s a bit weird that with 13% of the vote uncounted, supposedly, and less than 2% separating Huckabee and McCain that the state GOP would declare McCain the winner.