After all the sound and fury over allegations that the 2006 Regional Transportation Authority election was rigged, Attorney General Terry Goddard announced today that a recount showed the sales-tax increase was, in fact, approved by voters.

This should put an end to all those allegations—based on what was, at best, flimsy evidence—that the county flipped the election. But it probably won’t.

Maricopa County election workers spent the better part of two weeks counting all the RTA ballots. However, before the count even began, election-integrity activists complained that chain-of-custody procedures weren’t followed when the ballots were taken to Maricopa County.

One final complaint, in a letter sent to Goddard by Pima County Democratic Party attorney Bill Risner, was that 19,000 ballots were possibly missing from the boxes. But earlier this week, activist John Brakey, after looking at six hours of video footage of the examination, determined the card stock used on the vote-by-mail ballots has a different thickness than that used on the regular ballots, which threw his back-of-a-napkin calculation off.

“I messed up,” Brakey told TW staff writer Mari Herreras. “I’m willing to take a hit for it.”

We'll have more in this week's Skinny and right here in The Range.