Meg Whitman was seriously on the ropes for her apparent lack of voting or even registering to vote until she was 46 years old.  Her contradictory and downright puzzling alibis and statements after the fact were utterly mockable, and Chris Kelly did the honors, as he’s wont to do.  But all along, Whitman was looking for a lifeline – some discrepancy in the reporting that she could use to muddy the entire story, to “prove” that the Sacramento Bee was wrong in their reporting, even if 99% of the story remains true.  She has found that lifeline.

Republican candidate Meg Whitman was registered to vote in Santa Clara County for nine months in 1999, Santa Clara elections officials said today, admitting that they supplied inaccurate information to The Bee and other news organizations on the issue.

The Registrar of Voters had previously told The Bee and other media outlets that there was no record of Margaret Cushing Whitman being registered to vote or voting in Santa Clara County in its current voter registration database, on its older microfiche records, or in a separate database of canceled voter registrations.

On Monday, Whitman’s campaign said its own team had last week discovered a previously unknown record of Whitman being registered to vote. They said they found it in an archived Santa Clara County voter registration database […]

DFM then found an archival voting registration record for Whitman on an old back-up file of the county’s 1999 registration records not available to county staff, he said.

“The back-up file confirmed that Ms. Whitman was registered to vote in Palo Alto from February 8, 1999 to October 4, 1999,” Moreles said.

Importantly, no votes took place in Santa Clara County between February and October 1999.  And while Whitman, according to the Registrar of Voters, re-registered in a different county sometime after that, there is not yet a record of such a registration – at least not until 2002.

The point is that this doesn’t fundamentally change the story about Whitman’s voting record.  She still hasn’t produced the full records on her own; still hasn’t confirmed any registration or vote prior to 1999, when she was 43 years old; still hasn’t accounted for the “I clearly remember voting in 1984” remark she made on Fox News yesterday; still hasn’t clarified numerous contradictions in her evolving set of stories; and still hasn’t shown a voting record befitting any kind of engaged citizen.

However, she has one little data point where the Bee made a mistake.  And she’s sure to use that to try and discredit the whole article and the whole issue.  Whenever asked about this from now on, she’ll start with “The Sacramento Bee article was inaccurate.”  And she’ll be technically right.  And it won’t answer the question.

It’ll probably work, too.

It’s at least good enough for Rudy Giuliani to endorse her.