"The court doesn't have that authority," Judge John E. Bridges told a rapt courtroom on Friday in this Eastern Washington city.

Aside from the revote ruling, it was a day of setbacks for the Democrats as Bridges denied their motions to dismiss the challenge or move it to the Legislature.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Dino Rossi and the state GOP sued to challenge Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire's election, saying her 129-vote margin of victory was tainted by so many errors and illegal votes that the courts should throw out the results and order a new election. They sued Secretary of State Sam Reed, a Republican, and the state's 39 counties.

As interveners in the case, Democrats have defended the election results, saying Rossi lacks the proof needed to overturn the election and that a revote would be unconstitutional.

Both sides claimed victory after Friday's daylong hearing: Republicans because the judge denied motions to dismiss the case, and Democrats because the judge granted their motion to take a revote off the table as a remedy.

"Obviously I am pleased," Gregoire said from the state capital of Olympia. "This is an important step to allowing the state to move on." Neither she nor Rossi attended the hearing.

Rossi spokesman Mary Lane called it a "crushing loss" for the Democrats. "We're convinced that this case is going to move forward in this court, that based on the evidence we have we will win, that Christine Gregoire, at some point in the future, will no longer be our governor," Lane said.

Though the judge dashed their hopes of a spring revote, Republicans said the courts still could nullify the election, forcing Gregoire to vacate the office until a new general election in November.

Rossi has repeatedly said he doesn't want to be anointed governor by the courts, and Lane reiterated that pledge on Friday.

"That's not the remedy we're seeking," she said.

Rossi, a real estate agent and former state senator, won the original count by 261 votes and won a machine recount by 42 votes. But to his dismay, a hand recount of 2.9 million ballots flipped the victory to Gregoire, Washington's three-term attorney general. She took office last month.

Republicans say they've identified more than 300 votes cast by felons, dead people and double-voters, as well as 437 provisional ballots that were mistakenly fed directly into the ballot counters without being verified.

Bridges denied several of the Democrats' motions to dismiss the GOP lawsuit Friday, ruling that the case should proceed in his courtroom - not in the Legislature or the Supreme Court, as Democrats had urged.

Dealing Democrats their biggest setback of the day, Bridges denied a motion to throw out the case on the grounds that Republicans had no legal basis to contest the election.

Bridges cautioned that he would set a high bar for overturning the election, but said it would be premature to dismiss the lawsuit without giving Republicans a chance to make their case in court.

"This court has set this out so you will have your plate full when you reach the Supreme Court," Bridges said, alluding to the inevitable appeal to the state's high court. He also dismissed a motion to get the case tossed out for lack of timeliness.

And in a move that will simplify the case, Bridges dismissed all 39 counties and their auditors as defendants. That came as a relief to many county attorneys who've struggled with the avalanche of paperwork in the case.

Many of the big questions in the case remain unanswered, such as how the Republicans will prove their case and what exactly will be their burden of proof. Either side could appeal any of the judge's decisions, make more motions, or the case could go to trial. The next move for both sides will be weeks or months of aggressive investigation, as they try to ferret out illegal votes and election errors that could help their case.

At the beginning of the hearing, Bridges asked both sides to explain what was happening to a courtroom full of more than 100 observers, including several groups of high school students.

"The state of Washington needs an open, transparent, public display of what happened in this election," said Robert Maguire, an attorney for the Republicans. "Without it, many - and perhaps the majority - of Washington voters will not believe the person sitting in the governor's office truly won the election."

Democrat attorney Jenny Durkan said Republicans need more proof to set aside an election for an office that's so important to the whole state.

"You have a vote, you do it the best that you can, and it may not be perfect, but you don't do it over," she said.

Explaining the importance of the rule of law, Bridges talked about one of the cases cited in the lawsuit, a late-1800s election challenge in Arkansas. Both governors employed their own militia, and state Supreme Court judges were kidnapped, he said.

"We think this is not what should go on in this system," Bridges quipped, "not that I don't wish I were kidnapped so I didn't have to make these decisions."