Archives for November 2009

Forgive me for obsessing on the topic, but when our foils at the Seattle Times editorial board and our friend Joel Connelly at the Seattle P-I are both editorializing in favor of changing the voting deadline from postmarked on election day to received by election day, you just know there’s gonna be another legislative move afoot to do exactly that. And with the facts firmly on my side, I just can’t let this one go.

Both Joel and the Times complain that ballot counting in Washington state is too damn slow, and both point to first-in-the-nation all-vote-by-mail Oregon and its received by election day standard as a model for how to do these things right, so you might reasonably assume that Oregon counts its ballots considerably faster.

Well… not exactly.

It’s hard to do an apple to apple comparison, what with last Tuesday having been our first all vote by mail general election, while Oregon didn’t have a 2009 general election at all, but a quick look at King County Washington’s performance during 2009 versus Multnomah County Oregon in 2008 bears some mixed results.

Of the 366,948 ballots cast in Multnomah in November 2008, 133,908 were tallied and reported by the end of election night, or roughly 36.49%. Of the approximately  600,000 ballots projected to have been cast in King in November 2009, 254,261 were tallied and reported on election night, or roughly 42.4%.

That’s right… on election night, slow as a snail King reported a larger percentage of the total ballots than did supposedly speedy Multnomah.

From there on, Multnomah jumps out ahead, tallying 60.69% of the total ballots cast by Wednesday night, and 94.3% by Thursday, compared to a relatively paltry 51.4% and 62.9% respectively for King. But how much of this advantage was due to Multnomah having all the ballots in hand by 8pm Tuesday? Not much.

Unlike King, Multnomah elections appears to have labored around the clock during the first few days following the election, generating 29 reports between 7:41 PM Tuesday and 4:40 PM Thursday, and at all hours of the day and night. KCE, not so much, generating just three reports during its equivalent three day period, working what appears to be a daily, eight-hour shift. And it really does take Multnomah a three-day, round-the-clock effort to push its way through 94.3% of the ballots it has on hand.

So what if King were to invest in the same sort of effort?

Well, as it turns out, KCE reports a daily estimate of the uncounted ballots it has on hand, and when you add those to the daily totals, King could have conceivably tallied as much as 72.9% of ballots by Wednesday night, and 85.9% by the end of the day Thursday. And by Friday night, when Multnomah had tallied 95.7 of its ballots, King already had 94.1% of projected ballots either tallied or on hand.

Thus it isn’t a lack of ballots that slows the counting process in King, but rather the lack of sufficient manpower and infrastructure to count them as the ballots come in. Indeed, moving the ballot deadline without dramatically increasing KCE resources would not have sped up the tallying process at all, as KCE barely got through the election day ballots on hand by the end of Friday’s first shift.

The point is, tallying mail in ballots takes time — much more time than polling place voting machines, which tally the ballots as they are cast — and given the rules that govern our elections, no all mail-in election is going to produce the near-complete election night totals we see from other states. And that is what the Oregon example really proves.

King County dropped an additional 20,953 Seattle ballots this afternoon, with Mike McGinn expanding his lead to a 4,939 margin in what until recently was considered a closely contested mayors race.

Mike McGinn	96,514	50.88%
Joe Mallahan	91,575	48.28%

McGinn won 56.5% of this batch of ballots, most of which I presume to have been received after election day. Talk about a trend.

I suppose that means Joe Mallahan will be conceding at his 5PM press conference today.

UPDATE:
Mallahan concedes, McGinn celebrates.

I’ve already spent some time joyfully fisking the Seattle Times’ “absurd” proposal to change the deadline on mail-in ballots from the current postmarked on election day, to the more restrictive received by election day, so there’s no need to do a line-by-line takedown of Joel Connelly’s own contribution to this peculiar genre of conventional wisdom, except to correct one very glaring misstatement of fact:

Every other state mandates that ballots be in the hands of election officials when polls close on election night.

Ten seconds of googling shows that this simply is not true. State imposed deadlines for receiving mail-in ballots are all over the place, ranging from Pennsylvania’s restrictive requirement that absentee ballots be received by 5PM the Friday before the election, to the more permissive postmarked on election day rules in Alaska, District of Columbia, Maryland, Washington and West Virginia. Yes, Oregon is the only other state with all mail-in voting, and it requires ballots be received by election day… but that’s not much of a statistical sample, now is it?

That factual error aside, Joel’s main argument for moving the ballot deadline is a large, stinky red herring, for the only thing sillier than his fantasy of Washington playing the decisive electoral role in a tight, 2012 contest between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney (if it’s that close in WA, the electoral college outcome would be a foregone conclusion long before election day), is his suggestion that our ballot deadline could conceivably contribute to a constitutional crisis.

The main problem with both Joel’s and the Times’ musings (apart from the fact that their proposal would inevitably, you know, disenfranchise tens of thousands of voters statewide), is that they insist on conflating King County Elections’ slow ballot counting performance with the mail-in ballot deadline, when in fact the two currently have very little to do with each other. As I reported on election night, KCE had about 350,000 ballots on hand as of 5PM the Friday before the election. Yet they only managed to count about 250,000 ballots as of election night, and didn’t finally get through that original 350K batch until Thursday afternoon.

So perhaps, the 485,000 ballots counted before KCE shut down for the weekend included all those received by election day. Perhaps. And this morning, nearly a week after the close of our virtual polls, KCE is only just now getting around to counting the ballots that have arrived since.

All else being equal, KCE would not be much further along in the counting process had the deadline for receiving ballots been election day. And with the vast majority of ballots arriving by the Friday following the election (it only takes a day or two to send mail within the county) moving the deadline could only speed up results by a few days, even with a dramatically expedited counting process.

As for the excruciatingly close contest that Joel imagines, it’s the provisional ballots, missing and mismatched signatures, counts, recounts and various canvassing board and court challenges that drags out the process for weeks. Had the ballot deadline been moved prior to the 2004 gubernatorial election, it would have ultimately done little if anything to expedite the certification process.

Mail-in ballots currently must be received by the certification date — 15 days after a primary or special election, 21 days after a general — but in practice, only a handful of out-of-state and overseas ballots, mostly from overseas military personnel, trickle in during the final weeks of the canvass. I suppose an argument could be made for moving up the ballot deadline to say, the Monday following the election (as in West Virginia), but that would not officially certify results any quicker.

Resources permitting, we could count the bulk of the ballots a couple days sooner, but the thousands of provisional and signature-challenged ballots set aside for special handling will take just as long to process, with or without the added burden of handling a trickle of late mail-ins. And anything along the lines of what Joel fears — a presidential race in hand-recount territory — simply cannot be avoided or expedited; in the end, there’s only one canvassing board, and it can only consider one disputed ballot at a time.

So Joel’s proposed “fix” would do nothing to ward off the paranoid fantasy he imagines.

It would, however, make it more difficult to vote, while dramatically truncating election campaigns well in advance of election day. And that makes for a proposal I simply cannot support.

Already up at the Urban Dictionary:

Stupak–A medical condition (subset of sepsis) resulting from unsafe – unnecessarily so – back alley abortions as a result of the “Stupak Amendment” to the 2009 Health Care Reform Bill.
Doctor: Unfortunately, while this would have been covered under private insurance carriers, public plans were barred from including women’s health measures. I’m sorry, you’ll have to see “Dr. Julio” in the alley behind 7-11.

(Three weeks later.)

Doctor: I believe you’ve developed Stupak, a form of sepsis, a severe illness in which the bloodstream is overwhelmed by bacteria.

I guess you can go to Urban Dictionary and vote if you wish. While there are others worthy of scorn in this sorry episode, Bart Stupak deserves to go down in history as the misogynistic disease that he is. If his barbaric poison pill is in the conference report, there will be political hell to pay.

(Props to Firedoglake and Eschaton.)

AND–From an article at The Hill, here’s a paragraph that neatly summarizes why the Stupak amendment is so asinine:

Stupak’s language not only prohibits abortion coverage in the public insurance option included in the House bill. It would also prevent private plans from offering coverage for abortion services if they accept people who are receiving government subsidies.

So, as far as anyone can tell, that would be virtually all plans.

My reliably liberal Democratic mother and stepfather both kinda like Florida Gov. Charlie Crist, as do many of their friends down there in the Sunshine State. Despite the fact that he’s a (gasp) Republican.

You know, you raise your parents as best you can, and then you have to let go.

But the point is, Crist is exactly the type of Republican, relatively moderate in both substance and demeanor, who has a shot at winning Democratic voters nationwide. Which of course is why the Club for Growth is attempting to “Scozzafaza” Crist in his bid for the U.S. Senate, pumping dollars behind right-winger Marco Rubio.

Don’t get me wrong, Crist is no liberal. But he’s no Mike Huckabee or Sarah Palin either. And whatever hope Republicans take nationally from gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey, NY-23 is a cautionary tale they would do well to heed.

Former U.S. Marine Jay Clough will announce his candidacy tomorrow for Washington’s 4th Congressional District, currently held by Republican incumbent Rep. Doc Hastings.

“I expect our Representative in this district to work harder.  As I traveled throughout the district in the last few months, I heard over and over that people did not see or hear from Doc Hastings. We need a representative who is proposing new solutions and providing real leadership. Someone who regularly travels to all parts of the district to listen to people’s concerns and bring common sense solutions back to Congress.”

Hastings has a well-earned reputation as one of the laziest members of the House. It’s only a matter of time before somebody sneaks up on him and takes him out by surprise.

UPDATE:
Oh yeah… Clough is running as a Democrat.

Last week’s contest was won by milwhcky. It was Waterford, Michigan.

Here’s this week’s, good luck.

Assuming he’s guilty, Christopher Monfort is a cop killer. From what limited biographical information we’ve learned about him thus far, I wouldn’t be surprised if he is seriously mentally ill. At the very worst, he’s an awful, sadistic, cold-hearted, anti-social murderer.

But calling him a “terrorist” just trivializes the word, and in some ways, trivializes the crime.

Terrorism is the use of violence and intimidation for political purposes. It is a crime against government. A crime against society. A crime against humanity.

But while killing a police officer in the line of duty wounds our entire community, Monfort is alleged to have killed a man… a husband, a son, a father of two small children. Whatever Monfort’s crazy beef with police officers in general may have been, the murder of Officer Timothy Brenton was also a personal crime, that will forever have a very personal and tragic impact on Officer Brenton’s family and friends. Two young children will grow up without a father, not because of terrorism, but because some asshole murdered him in cold blood, as he sat in his patrol car.

So don’t waste the word by labeling Monfort a “terrorist” even if in his own deluded mind, that’s what he fancied himself to be. Assuming he’s guilty as charged, he is a cop killer. And in our society, labels don’t get much worse than that.

The US House just passed HR 3962, the health care reform bill. A solitary Republican voted “Yea.” Roll call should be up here after a while. If you go there, you can also check out Roll 884, the Stupak Wire Coat Hanger Amendment.

The Seattle Times editorial board is once again arguing for making it more difficult to vote.

AH, the weekend after the election and that weird feeling of knowing it could be several weeks before voters learn results of the Seattle mayoral race, a contest essentially tied.

Actually, as the Times’ own news report acknowledges, Mike McGinn took a “decisive lead” in the mayoral race by 8PM last night, but the editorial board writes its weekend editorials in advance, so I guess it would be unreasonable to expect a newspaper to go back and edit something as trivial as a lede to reflect something as trivial as actual news.

Wouldn’t want to learn results too close to Election Day, would we?

Personally, I find the suspense rather exciting, as do, apparently my readers, judging from the sustained traffic HA has generated in the days following the election. In fact, HA rose to prominence covering the excruciatingly drawn out 2004 gubernatorial contest, and I’m guessing the Times sold a helluva lot of newspapers doing the same.

So apart from potentially interfering with their ability to pen a Sunday editorial Friday morning that can maintain its factual relevance much past Friday evening, I’m not sure what the Times editors are complaining about.

New York managed to count its ballots Election Night, so Mayor Bloomberg knew results as he tucked himself into bed. Virginia? New Jersey? No problem.

And as a transplanted East Coaster, I can confidently assure you that there is nothing native Seattleites want more than to be more like Virginia, New Jersey and of course, New York.

Here in the high-tech Northwest, vote counting is slow. Washington lawmakers absurdly refuse to change a law that says ballots must be postmarked — not received — by Election Day.

So when the Times editors say it is downright “absurd” of lawmakers to “refuse to change a law that says ballots must be postmarked — not received — by Election Day,” they unambiguously imply that the need to require ballots to be received by Election Day is obvious. You know… it would be absurd to disagree.

But what exactly is the problem that the Times is attempting to solve?

Clearly, the Times antsy, ADHD editors don’t like to be kept waiting, but while close races do occur under our current system, they are the exception not the rule, and many such races would still remain undecided on election night, regardless of the deadline for mailing in one’s ballot. For example, of the 185 countywide and city races held in King County on Tuesday, currently only two remain within the mandatory recount margin: ballot propositions in Black Diamond and Normandy Park.

Yeah, sure, it took a few days to determine the winner in Seattle’s mayoral race, but other than a couple sleepless nights on the part of Mallahan and McGinn, what harm was done? The Times doesn’t even attempt to make a public policy argument for why definitively knowing the results sooner on a bare handful of close races is worth making it more difficult to vote.

This sets up a lengthy wait during most of November for ballots from New Zealand, the Arctic and other locations to arrive by burro.

That is, if by “lengthy” they mean a couple days and if by “burro” they mean the U.S. Postal Service. Talk about being absurd. No doubt ballots have occasionally come from as far away as New Zealand or the Artic, but the overwhelming majority arrive by the Friday following the election.

Oregon has had all-mail elections for more than 10 years but its law says ballots have to be received by Election Day. Voters know the mailing deadline and use the many convenient drop boxes if they are tardy. Votes are counted promptly.

And Oregon also has a progressive income tax, but I don’t see the Times editorializing in favor of that.

Almost every year, Secretary of State Sam Reed introduces legislation to change the rule. But county auditors and lawmakers protest that they will disenfranchise voters.

I suppose it would be elitist of me to suggest that the collective judgment of 39 county auditors and 147 legislators might somewhat balance the opinion of Sam Reed and the half dozen Blethen-appointed hacks on the Times editorial board.

Oregon voters don’t feel disenfranchised. In fact, Oregon election officials say it can be quite difficult to read a postmark.

And nobody knows the mood of Oregon voters better than the editors of the Seattle Times, who are so in touch with their own readers that they managed to endorse the losing candidate in both contested countywide races, the mayor’s race, and two out of four Seattle city council contests.

The dirty little secret in Washington is thousands of ballots go uncounted every year because they arrive with outdated postmarks.

As opposed to the tens of thousands of ballots that would go uncounted each year due to outdated postmarks should the Times’ proposal be enacted.

Also, King County should be treating Election Week the same way electrical workers treat a power failure: by working around the clock.

Um, in defense of King County Elections workers, even though it took them until Friday to determine the mayoral winner from Tuesday’s election, that’s still three days faster than it took City Light’s electrical workers to restore my power after the 2006 windstorm… and I didn’t have to freeze my ass off in the interim. I’m just sayin’….

Clearly, the county has had its challenges. Voters decided late in the election cycle and held onto ballots much longer than normal.

And these very same late voters broke decisively for Mike McGinn. Which brings us to the most serious concern regarding the Times’ proposal: it might not only determine the outcome of a close race sooner, it could potentially change it.

Indeed, considering the dynamics of the Seattle mayoral race, had voters been required to post their ballots by the previous Friday, Joe Mallahan might very well have won. And whoever you supported in this race, that would be an unintended consequence that deserves considerably more thought than the Times editors are willing or able to give.

Election operations had to be moved to higher ground because of flood concerns. Officials, understandably, try to be as careful as possible after the 2004 gubernatorial election.

Staffing has been enhanced by about 400 but should be boosted more. And election workers should work all day and all night Election Week. Voters deserve a more modern and speedy ballot-processing system.

So the Times is suggesting that KCE should hire and train enough temporary workers to fill three shifts a day during election week, which I suppose would difficult but doable, if at considerable additional expense. Perhaps the Times would be willing to give up its newly won B&O tax break and its longtime sales tax exemption to help pay for the manpower necessary to count ballots faster?

The point is, while everybody would prefer that ballots be counted a little faster, there are costs and tradeoffs involved. And I’m not convinced that the tradeoffs, at least, are worth it.

It is do or die time on healthcare reform, and with Republicans promising not a single vote in favor of the Democratic plan, it is time for us here in the Pacific Northwest to let our Democratic representatives know that if they don’t support us, we won’t support them.

For example, Rep. Kurt Shrader, from Oregon’s 5th Congressional District has recently made it known that he would oppose the House bill, despite consistent polls showing that his constituents support it. Sure, you could just call the Congressional switchboard at 1-866-220-0044, and ask to be connected to Shrader’s office, but that would be easier to dismiss as just run of the mill public pressure. Wouldn’t it make more of an impact to disrupt the day to day workings of his office by calling a more direct line?

Fortunately, I’ve just been forwarded the number of Rep. Shrader’s Legislative Director, Chris Huckleberry. Give him a call at 1-xxx-xxx-xxx, and let him know where we the people stand on healthcare reform, particularly if you live in Shrader’s district.

On a similar note, Rep. Brian Baird, representing Washington’s 3rd Congressional District has also recently stated his intent to vote against the bill in its current form. You can call his office and register your complaint at the following published phone numbers, but if anybody out there has a more direct line into Rep. Baird’s office, I’d be happy to post it here.

Washington D.C. – (202) 225-3536
Olympia – (360) 352-9768
Vancouver – (360) 695-6292

UPDATE:
Rep. Shrader voted Yes, so I’ve removed his legislative director’s phone number. I don’t know if he always planned to vote yes (he never made a public statement), or if constituent pressure persuaded him, and frankly I don’t really care. He voted the right way, and I thank him.

Rep. Baird on the other hand… well, his vote with the Republicans was a mistake, both as policy and as politics.

(And there are 40 other media clips from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

Democratic Rep. Brian Baird (WA-03) says he’ll vote against health care reform, no word on Rep. Adam Smith (WA-09). Brad Shannon has the story, along with a statement from Dwight Pelz encouraging members of the delegation to support reform.

Baird cited, among other things, wanting more information from CBO. Okay then. Let’s summarize the financial situation: trillions for empire, trillions for banksters, trillions for anyone but regular people who need a fair shake.

At a certain point you’re not even trying, you’re just kind of there because you’re there.

Yes, the health bill is flawed. Cry me a river. Our system boils things down to a dichotomy, and you have to choose.

Citizens have to choose every time we mark and mail our ballots, if we get around to it.

Details are starting to emerge about suspected cop-killer Christopher Monfort, and not surprisingly, he sounds a little crazy. And as it turns out, he’s also a pretty crappy artist.

Really. Those are images from a 2003 art exhibit of Monfort’s titled “No War” at Highline Community College. Kinda creepy.

From the exhibit’s web page:

Chris Monfort has been seriously painting for two years, and plans to continue throughout his life. He does not believe in any particular set of rules as far as artistic expression is concerned, and his work portrays this freedom. He has a love for color and motion, particularly during long gloomy winters. His apartment is full of colorful paintings. He says, “they give me the energy that’s missing from our sunless winters!”

Monfort plans to complete two degrees before leaving Highline; a transfer degree and a degree in Administration of Justice. He then plans to earn a bachelors degree and possibly head for Harvard Law School. His alternate plan is to earn a Masters degree and teach at a college somewhere warm!

I guess life didn’t turn out quite the way Monfort expected. It rarely does. But disappointment doesn’t lead most of us to cold blooded murder.