Goldy

As best as I can tell, there are two main arguments being offered in favor of changing the ballot deadline from the current postmarked by election day to the more restrictive received by election day: 1) candidates and voters deserve to know who won on election night; and 2) it is the only way to avoid fiascos like the drawn out 2004 gubernatorial count.

But the flaw in these arguments is that they both represent a solution in search of a problem, and a solution that regardless, just wouldn’t work.

The gist of both arguments is that ballot counting is too slow, and that the only way to speed this is up is to require that all ballots be received by election day.  That way, theoretically, we could report somewhat complete unofficial results on election night, just like we used to do when voting was primarily conducted at the polls. But a quick glance at ballot statistics in both Washington and Oregon reveals just how faulty that logic is.

The following table shows the cumulative ballot receipt numbers for King County in the days just preceding and following the 2009 general election. The third column represents these ballots as a percentage of the total number cast, based on a projected turnout of 55%. The fourth column represents the cumulative number of ballots counted and reported as of the end of that day.

	Ballots Received	Pct. Of Vote	Ballots Counted
Fri. 10/30	229,825	38.70%
Mon. 11/2	289,950	48.82%
Tue. 11/3	452,522	76.19%	254,261
Wed. 11/4	572,611	96.41%	308,650
Thu. 11/5	581,313	97.88%	377,157
Fri. 11/6	582,757	98.12%	485,856

As can be seen, 452,522 ballots were received by election day, roughly 76% of the total number cast. Yet only 254,261 were counted by the end of the day… barely more than the total number of ballots in hand the Friday prior to the election.

The bulk of the remainder of the ballots cast arrived the next day, with 572,611 in hand at KCE, or over 96% of the total number cast. Yet only 308,650 of these were counted by the end of Wednesday.

There are several obvious lessons to learn from the data. The first is that KCE can’t keep pace with the ballots it is already receiving, thus any delay in reporting returns is due not to a lack of ballots, but rather a lack of capacity to process them. This is true in Oregon as well, which typically reports only 50% of total votes by the first ballot drop election night, not much better than King County, and generally somewhat worse than Washington state as a whole.

That said, even the 43% of total votes reported by KCE on election night was a large enough sample to accurately project the winner in all but a handful of the hundreds of contests countywide. Candidates and voters do know the winners on election night, at least in the vast majority of races.

Of course, as the 2004 gubernatorial contest reminds us, there are those exceptionally close races where the counting and recounting can drag on for weeks, but these are fleetingly rare, and regardless, would not be impacted at all by moving the ballot deadline. This November, over 96.4% of ballots were received by Wednesday, and 98.1% by Friday. Even if we were willing and able to dedicate the resources necessary to count the ballots as they come in, it would only accelerate initial reports by a day, maybe two at most.

The fact is, it typically only takes a day or two to send mail within the county, thus the bulk of late postmarked ballots will inevitably arrive within a day or two following the election, as the table above definitively shows. Most of the remainder of ballots that trickle in over the next week or two are those coming from voters overseas and/or in the uniformed services, and I’m guessing there is little or no political support for making it even harder for overseas military personnel to vote.

That’s why, even in states with more restrictive ballot deadlines, exceptions are usually made for overseas voters. For example, Pennsylvania, which requires elective absentee ballots be received by the Friday before the election, allows overseas civilian and military ballots to arrive as late as ten days after. And that’s a pretty typical deadline nationwide.

Yes, it would be nice to get near complete results on election night the way most other states do, and they way we used to get here in Washington state before mail-in ballots started to dominate our voting, but this is the nature of mail-in elections. It takes time and resources to sort, process and verify signatures just in preparation for counting, and so we’ll never approach the sort of election night returns the likes of Reed, Gov. Gregoire and the Seattle Times editorial board apparently want. They sure don’t do it Oregon, even with their received by deadline.

Personally, I’d rather we get the count right, than fast. And I’m not sure I’m willing spend the extra money necessary to do both, let alone disenfranchise tens of thousands of late voters in the process.

Ross Reynolds will be talking with Secretary of State Sam Reed and Rep. Sam Hunt sometime between 12:20 and 12:40 PM today on KUOW’s The Conversation, about the ballot deadline debate, and since I’ve been covering it so obsessively they’re gonna give me a couple minutes to respond before going to the phones.

I’ll have updated data to share with readers and listeners at that time.

UPDATE:
Well, for whatever reason, they didn’t get to me, which is too bad because Sam Reed was wrong or misleading on several facts.

I just finished listening to KUOW’s broadcast of a special Veteran’s Day edition of BackStory… one of my favorite public radio shows. The episode, “Coming Home: A History of War Veterans,” along with links to additional material is available from the BackStory website, or you can just listen to it below.

[audio:http://www.backstoryradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/Coming-Home-A-History-of-War-Veter.mp3]

These things don’t happen in a vacuum, and so it is not surprising to see Gov. Chris Gregoire joining the chorus of establishment voices demanding that the ballot deadline be changed from postmarked on election day to received by election day.

Earlier in the day, Gregoire said that the days, and potentially weeks, of not knowing the outcome of an election is hard not only on the candidates, but on the people who voted for them.

“Those candidates deserve to know. The people deserve to know,” Gregoire said about the counting process.

But as admirable as her empathy for her fellow politicians might be, the governor has yet to say a word about the real scandal in last Tuesday’s election: the forty-some thousand King County voters who were disenfranchised due to our state’s wholly inadequate ballot design and review procedures.

With the bulk of the ballots counted, my earlier analysis holds up. More than 9 percent of King County ballots fail to record a vote on Initiative 1033, compared to only 3 percent in the rest of the state. Meanwhile, the equally high profile Referendum 71, featured at the top of the ballot (as opposed to hidden underneath the instructions), enjoys a remarkably low 1.6 percent residual vote rate in King County, right in line with voters throughout the rest of the state.

And this otherwise inexplicable falloff in voting on I-1033 occurred despite the fact that the No campaign spent millions of dollars on TV ads that explicitly instructed voters on where to find the question on the King County ballot.

Gov. Gregoire and Secretary of State Sam Reed may not have noticed the scandal, but the Voting Technology Project at the Brennan Center for Justice has, citing the I-1033 vote as “more evidence, if any was needed, of the potential disenfranchising effects of poor design.”

But the Brennan Center goes further, actually recommending a very simple, reasonable and inexpensive reform:

What probably would have alerted officials to this problem ahead of time, and at little or no cost, would have been a simple usability test: observing ten or fifteen King County citizens as they “voted” on the ballot before the design was finalized. This solution is simple, easy and cheap. The Usability Professionals Association has a great explanation of how it’s done.

If county officials watched a dozen people fill out the ballot, at least a couple might have accidentally skipped the ballot initiative. And, with that, officials would have been alerted to the fact that their ballot contained a serious flaw.

The ballot eventually got it’s usability test, of course…but on Election Day. And approximately 40,000 voters showed — a little too late — that this particular ballot design failed.

Secretary of State Sam Reed has been pushing the ballot deadline issue hard behind the scenes, attempting to capitalize on what has been wrongly portrayed as a slow, long slog to determine the winner in the Seattle mayoral race. But while both he and Gov. Gregoire argue to fix a problem that is not a problem, with a solution that will not speed up election night reporting at all, they both ignore an obvious flaw in our elections system, that just disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters, and that can be easily fixed via a small, inexpensive procedural reform.

I don’t expect the Governor or the Secretary of State to agree with me on every issue. But I do expect them to have their priorities in order when it comes to something as basic to democracy as the integrity of our electoral process.

I’ll be emceeing a couple of celebrations this week, and you’re all invited.

Geov Parrish 50th Birthday Roast & ETS! Benefit
On Friday evening, Nov. 13, join me, Knute Berger (Crosscut), former school board president Brita Butler-Wall, Tim Harris (Real Change), Lansing Scott (ETS!), Maria Tomchick (KEXP) and Mike McCormick (KEXP) as we celebrate the unlikely occasion of Geov Parrish’s 5oth birthday by viciously roasting him. Assuming Geov makes it to his 50th birthday.

The festivities take place at the University Baptist Church, 47th & 12th NE in Seattle’s University District, where there will be cake, desserts, the usual party frivolities, and of course, roasted Geov. Tickets are $15 or two for $25; all proceeds benefit Eat the State! Doors open at 7PM.

King County Democrats Victory Celebration
Pop the corks and toast the winners as the King County Democrats celebrate an outstanding election season. Join us for a champagne buffet, awards and prizes, special guests and more. Tickets are $25, and benefit the KCDCC.

Sunday, Nov. 15 at Renton Carpenter’s Hall, 231 Burnett Avenue North, Renton. RSVP here, or call 425.255.2679.

Look forward to seeing you all there.

State Sen. Fred Jarrett announced today that he would give up his seat to serve as Deputy Executive to former primary rival Dow Constantine. The newly enhanced position will make Jarrett the number two man in King County Executive’s office. It’s a good fit for Jarrett, who brings both extensive legislative experience to the position, and administrative experience as both Mercer Island mayor, and a longtime Boeing executive.

Yeah, sure, until a couple years ago, Jarrett was a (ugh) Republican… but he was always my favorite Republican — more liberal on more issues than some Eastside Democrats — so I have no misgivings there.

Writing in the Washington Post in the wake of the 2004 presidential election, Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury pitched his own state’s vote-by-mail system as an answer to touch screen and polling place staffing controversies experienced elsewhere. But in doing so, he obviously felt the need to spin one of vote-by-mail’s biggest perceived weaknesses: its relative slowness in reporting results.

With a large number of ballots received before Election Day, the first tally released on election night contained nearly 50 percent of the vote and proved to be an accurate predictor of the final numbers.

That’s right, Oregon’s first election night tally in 2004 encompassed less than half the ballots ultimately counted… a little more than King County’s first and only election night report last Tuesday, and a little less than that for Washington state as a whole. As I’ve explained before, it’s not the lack of ballots that slows our returns, but rather the lack of sufficient resources to count the ballots as they come in.

If the goal of Washington Sec. of State Sam Reed, and now Gov. Chris Gregoire, is to provide near complete returns on election night, changing the ballot deadline to Oregon’s received by election day standard simply won’t do it. Rather, the only reliable solution would be to scrap vote-by-mail altogether.

Forget the fact that he ran the most impressive, effective, tireless, grassroots campaign I’ve seen since I started following local politics. According to the political sages at the Seattle Times, Mike McGinn mostly owes his victory to moody voters…

SEATTLE voters are in a testy mood. They turned down the practical, stay-the-course mayoral candidate, Joe Mallahan, and opted for the anti-establishment, in-your-face change agent, Mike McGinn.

Which of course explains why Seattle voters also overwhelmingly chose the practical, stay-the-course candidate, Dow Constantine, in the race for King County Executive. Yup… we sure are “drawn to nonconformists.”

Has anybody else noticed how thoroughly Susan Hutchison got her ass kicked?

With the latest ballot drop, Hutchison has fallen to 40.93% of the vote. To put that in perspective, that’s less than a point and a half better than admitted-Republican David Irons garnered in 2005, a race in which a third party candidate captured 4.6% of the vote.

And an 18-point margin? That’s embarrassing, especially considering that she actually thought she was going to win this thing up until a couple days before the election.

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.

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.

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.