I may have been too hasty in my assessment of Secretary of State Donetta Davidson's refusal to seek a special prosecutor for the registration fraud. Both the Post and the Rocky have reports this morning that additional manpower will be brought to bear on the problem. Also Ken Salazar will recuse himself from legal issues regarding the election over the next two weeks, and, one presumes, until the election is settled here in Colorado. Instead questions will be handled by a team of attorneys, one Democrat and one Republican.

This is good news on the retrospective front, and assures that Salazar, who had a clear conflict of interest in interpreting election law, will be out of the process for the duration.

The bad news is that it's not clear that this closes very many of the at-the-polls loopholes that still exist in the process. The worse news is that neither paper seems to know enough about the process to ask those questions, or to be able to present the issue in an informed way to voters.

Still, it looks as though the ground is being prepared to immunize the electorate against Democratic charges of disenfranchisement. David Harsanyi features an interview with an indignant black woman, upset that Democrats' tactics may backfire, discouraging blacks from participating in the process. And Nicol Andrews notes that "Democrats aren't above cheating," provoking a sputtering, vaguely incoherent response from the local Kerry-Edwards campaign.

It's good to see these traditional charges finally being dealt with.