PubliCola's editorial board is marking its ballot (and mailing it in today!) for current King County Elections Director Sherril Huff . We say "current" instead of "incumbent" because the position wasn't an elected one until the voters—fed up with the series of election migraines that had only just begun with the Rossi v Gregoire fiasco of 2004—made it an elected spot last November.

We at PubliCola do not support hyper-Democracy as a fix to all our problems (we think, for example, the School Board should be appointed, light rail should be built without votes, and FilmNerd believes the "Audience Pick" at SIFF is a disgrace), but we can't fault the rabble for going all Liberty Pole on KC Elections.

Enter Sherril Huff, appointed  by Ron Sims in 2007 to clean up the mess. And she has done just that. In fact, PubliCola credits Huff (and the fact that every ballot was marked Democratic) for making 2008 one of the smoothest sailing elections ever. We're also sure that conscientious election dept. staffers Bobbie Egan and Megan Coppersmith-Heaven are equally responsible for the recent success. Neither one, to our disappointment, is on the ballot, though. So, we choose their obviously organized boss, Sherril Huff.

Moreover, we were recently terrorized by the bizarre email correspondence we uncovered between a weird Republican voter and one of the scarier leading contenders, Republican State Senator Pam Roach (R-31, Enumclaw).

Another one of the candidates, Julie Anne Kempf, is actually the root cause of all evil at King County Elections. Her misdeeds date back to her wild stint as Assistant Superintendent of Elections in the late 1990s when her shenanigans gave me my first big scoop after she wound up at the center of a plot involving missing documents and backdated files. (Despite that scandal, KC Exec Ron Sims promoted Kempf and look what happened: Three years later, at this point Superintendent, Kempf got caught backdating records and lying about it.

And then there's David Irons, a former Republican KC Council Member who flamed out in his 2005 run for KC Exec against Ron Sims when muckraker David Goldstein at HA Seattle started reporting on the details about the Irons family feud and the mainstream media picked it up.

We have nothing but nice things to say about another one of the candidates in this non-partisan race, Republican Chris Clifford, a genuine citizen watchdog. But we'd rather see Clifford continue to throw garbage at the powers that be from his seat in the bleachers.

You voted to make the King County Director of Elections an elected position. Now vote for the best candidate, the woman whose proven she can oversee a major Countywide election, Sherril Huff.

The PubliCola Editorial Board: Josh Feit, Sandeep Kaushik, Chris Kissel, Technerd, FoodNerd, SportsNerd, MusicNerd, FilmNerd, ObamaNerd, and NerdNerd.