What happened at the Washington State Republican Caucuses?

A lot of the so-called scandals this year in voting have really been people looking hard for the first time at procedures that have been in place for decades. For example, some were accusing the New Hampshire voting authorities of malicious intent for storing votes in reused boxes from fish packing and the like. The reality is, that is how it had been done for a long time, and no one had questioned the penny-pinching practice before.

But then, there are a few cases that make you wonder how serious election officials really are about accuracy. Consider this case from Washington State.

For probably the first time in all the primaries and elections I've ever watched, the folks running the election decided to stop counting the votes with 13% of the votes uncounted. And this wasn't a 70-30 blow out, but a tight race where the two top vote getters were separated by less than 2% of the vote. Then this morning, state party chair Luke Esser decided to declare McCain the winner...

But state party chair Luke Esser said that he just thought it was the right thing to do. 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.

Apparently, the Huckabee campaign is furious and trying to get access to see the rest of the votes counted. Have any of our Mod-Bloggers on-site in Washington heard anything more about this?