Good morning, Washington. With just one week and one day until the general election, the Post is reporting that Barack Obama has opened up an eight-point lead over John McCain in Virginia. Pretty amazing. That is the same amount by which President Bush beat John Kerry in the state in 2004. We don’t follow every minute detail of electoral college politics as closely as probably even some of you do, so you tell us what you think: if rather early on in the evening on Nov. 4, Obama has a clear victory in Virginia, is there any way McCain could still find enough electoral votes to realistically threaten to win the election? Oh, and this really ought to be the biggest story of the morning.

More Faulty Ballots Found: Remember the error-ridden absentee D.C. ballot we told you about at the end of last week? Well the Post reports this morning that the problem with the ballots for single member district 2F03 were sent out to as many as 126 voters. The good news is that the error appears to be isolated to just the one single member district, and the remaining bad ballots have now been removed from the election process. The bad news is two-fold: there may not be a way to prevent some of the voters who already received the ballots from casting them (especially if they requested them because they were planning to be out of town for an extended period of time), and the DCBOEE is not sure if the problem with the ballots for this voting district, which is split between two different wards, is new or has been wrong since 2002.

Finance Office Failed to do Background Checks: No tales of incompetence coming out of the District’s finance office should come as too much of a surprise anymore, but the Examiner is right to make a big deal of this latest auditor’s report that shows that CFO Natwar Gandhi’s office has failed to conduct consistent pre-employment background checks. The finance office isn’t the same thing as the scandal-plagued Office of Tax and Revenue, although both are technically under Gandhi’s management.

Briefly Noted: Four people shot on North Capitol Street … D.C. shop owner accused of selling stun guns … Former Capitol Hill aide sentenced in child porn case.

Photo by s i x o n e s e v e n