Mood is an important indicator of voting behavoir as election day approaches, and unfolds. What do people feel about what’s going on? Who do they feel sympathetic for, and who not?

King County’s Republicans should have borne that in mind when they launched their bad-registration effort last week. An effort aimed at pointing out hard-to-visualize flaws in the election system has resulted in scores of quite innocent and highly visible people talking about how they have been intimidated and harassed by the county’s Republican Party.

King has had election office problems, of course, made extremely visible a year ago when the outcome of a super-close governor’s race appeared to hinge on them. With the Democratic county executive up for election now, you can understand Republican interest in highlighting whatever problems are out there.

One notion they’ ve seized on is that of illegal voting - people who either aren’t qualified to vote or who registered improperly nonetheless casting ballots. The Republicans came up with 1,774 questionable registrations - questionable on grounds that some of the addresses given didn’t appear to be proper residential addresses. They filed a complaint over the name of county Republican ice Chairman Lori Sotelo.

In truth, 1,774 in a county as large as King doesn’t seem like an extravagent mistake; even if all those registrations were bad, they didn’t reflect all that badly on a county which has more than a million registered voters. The real problem is that a large portion of them - we’re still finding out how many - weren’t mistakes on the county’s part at all; instead, the Republicans challenged the registration of a bunch of people who were properly registered. Such as, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer

“I’m extremely disappointed and angry at the audacity of this woman and the party she represents,” said Demene Hall, who got one of the letters. Hall has lived for 16 years at the Watermarke apartment building at 320 Cedar St. in Seattle, her registration address.

Hall, who said she is “too African American” not to be a regular voter, said Friday she came of age in the civil rights era and watched her parents hand out political fliers outside polling places they were not allowed to enter.

“We just buried Rosa Parks on Wednesday, I got the letter on Thursday and today is my 57th birthday,” she said. “And they’re challenging my validity?”

What happened to her and a bunch of other people are not likely to play well around King County, as voters prepare to cast their ballots. One lesson here: If you’re going to base a good chunk of your attack on mistakes committed by the other side, you’d better be free of them yourself.

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