Archives for November 2010

While the rest of the media focuses on the allegedly close race between incumbent Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders and sane challenger Charlie Wiggins (as predicted, Wiggins took his first lead today, on his way to a 10,000-plus vote victory), there really is only one true tossup race listed on the Secretary of State’s website: the 61-vote spread between Democratic incumbent State Rep. Dawn Morrell, and girl-scout-hating challenger Hans Zeiger in LD-25. And while returns have trended Democratic throughout much of the state this past week, Zeiger has closed the gap for the second day in a row.

There’s maybe about 550 ballots left to count in LD-25, and Zeiger would have to win 55.5% of that to pull into the lead, which shouldn’t be likely. But it’s such a small sample of votes left that anything can happen. Either way, this one is almost certainly heading into hand recount territory.

Fortunately, Democrats tend to pick up votes in hand recounts due to the demographic extremes we represent: the poorest, the oldest, the newest, the least educated and the best educated voters… four out of five of which tend to have more problems filling out ballots than your average voter. But, I’d rather not have to put that thesis to the test.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9nzjhA5ON5g&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

These people are fucking nuts. I’m just sayin’.

Given this year’s losses, I was wondering if State House Speaker might see a challenge from within his party… and just a few minutes ago, State Rep. Mark Miloscia (D-30) issued a press release announcing yup…

“It is not enough for Democrats to win close elections; we must actually improve people’s lives. We only won because the voters recognized the Republicans also offered no solutions. The truth is that Democrats are failing the middle class and the voters don’t believe that government works for them. The people of this state have sent a clear message that a new direction is needed from our state leadership. Unlike our Governor (“I don’t have a path forward, to be honest..”) and the current leadership, I do have a plan that will involve more legislators and citizens engagement, take us in a new direction, and bring responsibility and prosperity to our state.”

For the past two years, Miloscia has been highly critical of the Democrat’s leadership’s proposed solutions, mostly consisting of gimmicks, big tax hikes combined with “a hope and a prayer.” Miloscia stated that the voters last week completely rejected the proposed Democrat Leadership’s solutions to our crisis (Income Tax, Eliminating 2/3 Vote for Taxes, Building Bonds, Soda Tax, etc) and party leaders are struggling to come up with something new. “I didn’t come to Olympia to watch the destruction of our education and human service systems. I came to chart a new path.”

Uh-huh.

I think Mioscia is a decent, well-intentioned guy and all that, I’ve long found some of his accountability proposals intriguing, and I don’t particularly mind seeing a leadership challenge… but I was kinda hoping for a challenge from the progressive side of the caucus. And besides, I think Miloscia is misreading this election.

But in any case, this should at least be fun to watch.

The leaves are falling, the temperature is dropping and the last few close races from the general election are finally sorting themselves out… which means it’s once again time for Secretary of State Sam Reed and his surrogates in the media to call for changing Washington’s vote-by-mail deadline from postmarked by election day to received by election day.

Reed said he supports a switch to the Oregon system, calling the postmark deadline “antiquated.”

“We would get a more meaningful result on election night,” he said. “More significantly, virtually all of the ballots would be counted by Friday.”

Except… actually… no, moving the ballot deadline would not result in a much more meaningful election night result, especially here in King County, where the real bottleneck comes not from when the ballots arrive, but rather, how long they take to process.

This bottleneck is perhaps best illustrated by comparing the 641,658 ballots King County reported tallied by the close of business Monday, to the 619,485 mail-in ballots it had received by the time the polls closed last Tuesday. As you can see, it took nearly an entire week for King to finally catch up with its election night backlog, and to start counting those ballots that arrived thereafter. And the county still estimates about 120,000 ballots remaining, not much less than the 147,616 ballots that arrived last Wednesday, 11/3, just a day after the election.

With a peak processing capacity of little more than 75,000 ballots a day, the 373,941 ballots King County tallied on Tuesday night barely exceeded the 349,670 ballots it had received as of the Friday before the election. Indeed, by the time the elections center opened its doors Monday morning, its staff had already fallen hopelessly behind. (And FYI, the same was true in 2009.)

So how would following the Oregon model speed things up? Well, on its own, it wouldn’t, and to understand why, we need merely look at the ballot return statistics for Oregon’s largest county, Multnomah, where even with its more restrictive deadline, only 45 percent of ballots were returned by the Friday before the election… nearly the exact same percentage as King County. Both counties received more than half of their ballots over the final few days of the election, the only difference being that Multnomah’s election was one day shorter. (Far from being the long, drawn out process Reed implies, over 98% of valid Washington ballots are received by the day after the election.)

Well then, how does Multnomah County manage to report results so much faster? Simple: they put more resources into it. Multnomah County processes ballots over the weekend before the election, while King County does not. And while King County reports a single election night return a little after 8 PM, before heading home for the night, Multnomah County continues to process ballots overnight, issuing subsequent reports at 8 AM and throughout the next day. Of course, King could duplicate Multnomah’s efforts, but that would cost money.

As you can see, Reed’s assertions just don’t hold up. Without significant  and ongoing investments in elections equipment and staff, switching the ballot deadline would not provide more meaningful election night results, nor even assure that “virtually all of the ballots would be counted by Friday.” King and other counties simply don’t have the capacity to keep pace with the ballots that arrive during the final few days of the election, and compressing these returns won’t make it any easier.

I don’t doubt the Secretary of State’s intentions, but the numbers just say he’s wrong. Moving the ballot deadline is a solution that just doesn’t work—and as I’ll explain in a subsequent post, it’s a solution in search of a problem that doesn’t exist.

Armed with the latest results and additional data, HA now projects challenger Charlie Wiggins the winner in his race against incumbent State Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders, by a 12,758 vote margin… you know, give or take a couple thousand.

For each county I divided total votes cast in the race by total ballots counted, and multiplied that by the estimated ballots on hand to calculate the estimated votes remaining. Then, to adjust for the late-ballot trend, I divvied up the remaining votes between the two candidates based on the percentage of the vote each respective candidate has received in results released after election night.

While Sanders has led Wiggins since the first ballot drop, and remains ahead by 3,785 votes, the late ballots have trended strongly in Wiggins’ favor throughout much of the state. Wiggins led in only eight counties on election night, but has led in 14 counties in the ballots counted since. Furthermore, more than half of the votes remaining lie in King County, where Wiggins has won over 61 percent of the late ballots. If anything, my calculations underestimate Wiggins strength, by failing to adjust for the favorable trend within the late ballots.

Based on these numbers it is safe to project that Wiggins will take the lead (and never give it up) once King releases today’s results. But I’m guessing it won’t be until early evening tomorrow before the rest of the media declares Wiggins the winner.

When I was a kid, my mother once showed me a jar in which she kept the body of a young woman she killed while performing an illegal, back-alley abortion. And that is why to this day I remain strongly pro-choice.

This morning I predicted the media would call WA-02 for incumbent Democratic Rep. Rick Larsen, “sometime between 4:30 and 7:00 PM today.” And predictably, around 6 PM this evening, they did. You know, four days after I called the race.

UPDATE:
Larsen, by the way, is now leading by 5,484 votes.

Just to be clear, not all Republicans are entirely incapable of losing graciously:

Republican nominee Tom Foley has just conceded the Connecticut gubernatorial race to Democrat Dan Malloy. And he went the extra mile at his press conference, too, telling all of his supporters that despite some irregularities and errors in the vote-counting process, Malloy positively did win the race by a narrow margin. And as such, he will not legally contest the election…

“Once all this information was available to me this morning, deciding what to do was easy,” Foley said. “I have told my team that I am not willing to pursue a legal challenge to exclude photocopied ballots. Despite their irregularity, I believe that they do represent the will of well-intentioned voters, and should be included in the results.”

Foley further explained that the election was a genuine victory for Malloy, “And this result should not be questioned. I hope my supporters will accept my word on this. As soon as I am done with this press conference, I will call Dan Malloy to congratulate him on winning the election, and wish him good luck.”

That’s what my people call being a mensch.

And had Dino Rossi been similarly gracious after his heartbreakingly close loss back in 2004, there’s a good chance he might be governor today, instead of just a three-time statewide loser. As I wrote back in 2005, just after his election contest had been dismissed, Rossi missed a golden opportunity to lead by example, and ultimately reap the rewards:

Had he bowed out gracefully in early January — at a time when the GOP’s most inflammatory allegations were at a fever pitch — he could have assumed the mantle of a martyr who sacrificed his own personal ambitions for the good of the state. Disenfranchised military voters, shady “enhanced” ballots, mishandled provisionals, and felon, dead, and double voters would have forever clouded the results of this election. But now with the charges “dismissed with prejudice” by a cherry-picked judge in conservative Chelan County, voters will be rightly suspicious of any attempt by Rossi to brand himself as a victim of corrupt Democrats. To the swing voters — mostly Democrats — who made this race closer than it ever should have been, the allegations are no longer merely unproved… they are disproved.

And it was Rossi’s inability to recapture the crucial support of so-called “Dinocrats” that ultimately doomed his two subsequent statewide races before they started.

How bad do the numbers look for incumbent Supreme Court Justice Richard Sanders? Well, he just sent out an email to supporters accusing his opponent, Charlie Wiggins, of trying to steal the election… which these days has kinda-sorta become the Republican equivalent of a concession speech.

Huh. I wonder if this contest ultimately gets settle in court, if Sanders will follow Dino Rossi’s lead, and decline to appeal due to the partisan makeup of the State Supreme Court?

Of course, the absurd thing about this accusation is that Wiggins is not black, and as Justice Sanders will tell you, only black people steal things.

That said, Wiggins supporters should pay close attention, and not let Sanders’ efforts at post-election GOTV go unchallenged. Sanders’ email claims that 17,000 ballots have not been counted due to signature issues, “many of them” for Sanders, and no doubt his goal is to canvass signatures from presumed Sanders voters. Sound familiar? That may have been the Democrats’ pivotal tactic in Gov. Chris Gregoire’s whisker thin victory over Dino Rossi in 2004.

So if Sanders and his supporters are out there canvassing signatures from pro-Sanders voters, the Wiggins folks better start planning to do the same, just in case his margin of victory isn’t as big as some project. After all this, we wouldn’t want Wiggins to lose the election simply by being out-hustled.

Yeah, I called the Washington US Senate race for Patty Murray on election night, just minutes after the first round of King County results was released, and I called WA-02 for incumbent Rep. Rick Larsen last Thursday, when he was still leading by only 1,451 votes. But in my boldest prediction yet, I’m sticking my neck out and projecting that the rest of the media will call WA-02 for Larsen sometime between 4:30 and 7:00 PM today.

The problem for Tea Party challenger John Koster is that even if the remaining ballots shift dramatically in his direction (and they won’t), there just aren’t enough ballots remaining for him to overcome Larsen’s 3,841 vote lead. Yeah, there’re still 30,000 ballots in Snohomish County, where Koster still leads by a 1.74% margin, but only about 47% of those are in WA-02. Koster would now have to garner over 54.5% of the estimated 42,000 or so ballots remaining district wide to surpass Larsen… a target that will only jump impossibly higher after today’s returns.

So yeah, the media will finally call this one for Larsen by the end of the day, after absurdly stretching the fiction of an undecided race for an extra three or four days.

Last week’s contest was won by Scott, who recognized that it was the intersection of York Rd S and 36th Ave S in South Seattle.

This week’s contest is another random location someone in the world. Good luck!

I’m not exactly calling the State Supreme Court race between incumbent Justice Richard Sanders and challenger Charlie Wiggins, because the “Ballots on Hand” data on the Secretary of State’s website is always just a rough estimate, but if you dump the county-by-county returns into a spreadsheet and project current margins against the estimated remaining ballots, of which nearly 53% are in King County, Wiggins comes out on top by about 5,600 votes.

I guess getting his crazy on during the final days of the campaign didn’t work out too well for Sanders.

Keep in mind that the “Ballots on Hand” numbers are notorious for fluctuating wildly, though they tend to become more reliable the further along we are in the counting process, so it’s certainly possible the data is incomplete, or even wrong. That said, my calculations merely average margins across the accumulated vote, and thus don’t account for the obvious trend toward Wiggins amongst late voters, so it’s very likely that his ultimate margin of victory will be even larger.

(If anybody has archived the county-by-county totals from election night, I’d be happy to work that into my spreadsheet. Overall we’ve seen about a 2 point swing in Wiggins favor statewide in the post-Tuesday count, which averaged across the counties would suggest a final 9,300 vote margin.)

Either way, and despite the fact he currently trails Sanders by over 13,000 votes, the smart money has gotta be on Wiggins.

1 Corinthians 14:34-35
Women should remain silent in the churches. They are not allowed to speak, but must be in submission, as the law says. If they want to inquire about something, they should ask their own husbands at home; for it is disgraceful for a woman to speak in the church.

Discuss.

Watching the Arizona-Stanford game right now, I want to post something that’s been on my mind related to college football. I don’t think I’ve ever met a college football fan who doesn’t despise the BCS system, but the money invested in the existing bowl system is what keeps us from ever getting the playoff system that everyone wants.

If college football fans want to usher in a playoff system, there’s one easy way to do it:

Stop going to the bowl games.

You could force the NCAA to adopt a playoff system by the end of January if the bowls were all played in front of tens of thousands of empty seats. I don’t understand why this isn’t discussed as a way to force their hand. You can yell and scream all you want about how much the BCS sucks, but they’re not going to listen until you figure out how to hit them in their wallets.

Levi Pulkkinen reports:

Thirteen teens associated with Redmond High School are facing drug charges after a long-running undercover operation involving a police officer posing as a student.

In charging documents filed earlier this week in King County Juvenile Court, investigators describe the months-long operation that saw a Redmond police detective enroll in the high school and buy drugs from students there.

Enrolled as a senior in August 2009, the detective described herself as a transfer student who’d recently moved to Redmond from California. She attended classes, ate lunch at the school and lived as a high school student until 11 students were arrested in February.

According to charging documents, the undercover officer was able to buy a wide variety of illicit drugs at the suburban high school, including ecstasy, heroin and cocaine.

Investigations like these are upsetting to me on a number of levels. For starters, if there are 13 different students dealing drugs at your suburban high school, arresting those students will – at best – provide a short window of time where those drugs are hard to obtain. In other words, if there’s enough commerce going on that it requires 13 different drug dealers to satisfy the demand, other sellers will quickly fill that void.

That said, I don’t really believe that there were 13 separate drug dealers supplying the students of Redmond High with drugs. What often happens in investigations like this one is the following scenario:

The female undercover officer enrolls in the school with the intent to seek out the “dealers”. With a little effort, she’s able to locate students who are occasional drug users. She then approaches a 16-year-old boy who perhaps some other students have told her smokes pot. This kid isn’t a drug dealer, but he knows the people who are. The undercover officer approaches him about acquiring drugs, asking “hey, do you know where I can buy drugs?” The 16-year-old, who thinks this new girl from California is kind of cute and now thinks she also likes to smoke pot, wants to impress her and decides to be the middleman himself. He visits someone he knows he can get some drugs from, buys them and brings it to her. He’s now a potential felon.

Without knowing any of the details of the cases against these 13 young people, no one other than the accused themselves has any idea how many would fit the profile I gave, but I have trouble believing that this one undercover cop managed to bring down over a dozen truly dangerous drug dealers in a single high school. Yes, drugs are widespread in our high schools, whether they’re in the city or out in the wealthy suburbs. But for the student in the scenario I gave, while his parents should rightfully be upset that he’s able to find drugs in high school, getting arrested will be far more detrimental to his prospects in life than the drugs were.

As a parent myself, this weighs heavily on my mind. I’m not happy about the fact that it’s so easy to get drugs in our schools (and it’s the main reason why I fight for regulated sales of softer drugs like marijuana and ecstasy – so that they can be as hard to obtain as alcohol), but sending in undercover officers to entrap at-risk teenage boys is not the right solution. In fact, it generally ends up being more of a threat to young people than a benefit.