HorsesAss.Org

I’m off to Olympia today to testify before the House Finance Committee on behalf of HB 1744, the Property Tax Homestead Exemption. If any of you happen to be wondering the halls of the John L. O’Brien Building at 1:30 PM, stop by Hearing Room C and say hello.

I’ll post a report later this evening.

Thanks to Washington State Political Report for pointing me towards a press release from state Sen. Margarita Prentice (D-Renton), announcing proposed legislation to impose a 10 percent tax on the state’s 125 commercial mini-casinos. SB 5287 would generate about $20 million a year for the general fund.

Prentice is also the prime sponsor of SB 5037, the Senate version of a House bill that purports to establish permanent funding for problem gambling treatment and prevention programs. Unfortunately, the bill would appropriate less than $600,000 a year, an amount Jennifer McCausland of Second Chance Washington calls “grossly inadequate.”

As I mentioned last week (“Scratch this! Lottery plans for big expansion“), neighboring Oregon, with a population half the size of Washington, dedicates 1 percent of lottery revenues to treatment and prevention programs… about $3.9 million annually. McCausland has advocated spending at least that much on Washington’s epidemic of problem gambling, and recently presented a proposal to Governor Gregoire’s office that would start off by appropriating $2 million a year of lottery revenues.

But wait… if we took 10 percent of the $20 million in revenues generated from SB 5287, and combined it with an additional $2 million from the lottery… we could fully fund SB 5037 to the tune of $4 million a year. It’s so crazy, it just might work!

According to a 1998 study, problem gambling already cost the state over $70 million a year, and the industry has doubled since then. It’s time the industry starts chipping in to clean up the public health mess it has helped to create.

[NOTE: It’s nearly impossible to post a comment about gambling without getting trapped in my blog spam filter… so please be patient if your comments are held for approval.]

The other day I posted a link to Carla and TorridJoe’s analysis of comparative “discrepancy” rates. They have posted a correction regarding Spokane County. (It doesn’t really change the conclusion.)

As a blogger, I have no obligation to be fair. But I choose to be so anyway.

Last year, not satisfied with simply opposing Tim Eyman’s stupid-ass initiatives, I decided it was time to make some constructive proposals of my own. And so I sat down with Steve Zemke of Taxpayers for Washington’s Future to explore creative alternatives for providing real tax relief to those families who needed it most, without exacerbating our state and local governments’ growing fiscal crisis.

After much research and deliberation, we settled upon a relatively simple proposal, a Property Tax Homestead Exemption, similar to that offered in 37 other states. Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos (D-37) was quick to embrace the proposal; a bill was soon drafted, and introduced as HB 3076.

Although last year’s bill died in committee during a short session, Rep. Santos has reintroduced the bill this year as HB 1744, with bipartisan support. The bill is scheduled for a hearing before the House Finance Committee, Wednesday Feb 16, at 1:30 PM… and I’m hoping many of you will join me in voicing your support.

HB 1744 exempts from all local property taxes a portion of your primary residence equal to 20% of your county’s median property value. Additionally, it exempts from the state property tax a portion equal to 20% of the state’s median property value.

The result is substantial property tax relief targeted at middle- and low income homeowners, while remaining absolutely revenue neutral.

How substantial? Well, last year the Department of Revenue estimated the following average savings based on a flat $30,000 exemption:

CY 2005		Number of		Average		Average		Percent
Assessed Value		Homeowners		Property Tax		Relief		Relief
< $50,000		97,433		$331		$267		81%
$50,000-$100,000		201,473		$993		$312		31%
$100,000 – $150,000		313,395		$1,650		$270		16%
$150,000 – $200,000		307,384		$2,255		$221		10%
$200,000 – $250,000		265,383		$2,772		$168		6%
$250,000 – $300,000		153,709		$3,383		$119		4%
$300,000 – $400,000		187,325		$4,144		$59		1%
$400,000 – $500,000		76,746		$5,179		-$13		0%
> $500,000		80,761		$9,191		-$326		-4%
All Homeowners		1,683,609		$2,741		$171		6%

As you can see, the vast majority of homeowners would pay lower taxes, with only a 4% increase on homes over $500,000. Note that since the actual bill adjusts the exemption to county median values, the break-even point shifts to a higher property value in higher valued counties. And since 82% of wealthy homeowners itemize their federal tax returns, their net tax increase is substantially reduced by their federal tax offset.

While home value and household income do not necessarily correlate, they tend to on average. And thus a Homestead Exemption would target tax relief to those homeowners who need it most.

To achieve this desperately needed property tax relief, HB 1744 modestly shifts tax burden from low value property to high value property, and from homes to non-residential property. This shift only partially corrects a trend that has been moving in the other direction over the past 20 years, and still leaves Washington with the most regressive tax structure in the nation (although it brings us much closer to number two, Florida… which happens to have a Property Tax Homestead Exemption of its own.)

A more detailed FAQ is available on TaxSanity.org, and from the Permanent Defense Homestead Exemption Center. You can also read the full text of the bill and the House bill analysis, from the Legislature’s website.

Steve and I, along with Andrew Villeneuve of Permanent Defense will be down in Olympia tomorrow, testifying at the hearing (1:30 PM, House Hearing Rm C, John L. O’Brien Building.) We hope some of you can make it.

And we urge all of you who support further debate on this bill to contact the members of the House Finance Committee and ask them to send the bill to the floor. Click here to send an email to the Committee members.

If you have any questions, please leave them in the comment thread, and I will answer them as best I can.

Part I of this exciting series on today’s plodding King County Council meeting can be summed up as follows: the military ballots went out on time, ballots were enhanced legally, and yes, some ineligible felons voted, but no it wasn’t due to corruption or negligence on the part of elections workers.

(Hmmm… perhaps Part I was a bit verbose?)

In this installment I will address the 348 improperly scanned provisional ballots, the 735 “no signature on file” ballots, and the incredibly overblown issue of the so-called “discrepancy.”

Provisional Ballots

As has been widely reported, KC Elections determined that 348 provisional ballots had been improperly scanned into the AccuVote machines at the polling places, before they had been properly canvassed to see if they were legal votes. Of these, 341 have been traced to specific voters, and 252 are confirmed to have been cast by valid, registered voters.

The proper procedure is that you sign a poll book, fill out a ballot, place it inside an envelope, complete the envelope, and deposit it in the slot in the side of the AccuVote machine. Once back at the counting center, election workers verify the envelopes, just like an absentee, before adding the ballot to the count, or rejecting it.

KC elections was able to determine who cast most of these polling-place-scanned provisional ballots by comparing the poll books with the provisional envelopes received from the polling place; those who signed the poll book but for whom there are no envelopes are assumed to have fed their ballot directly into the machine.

It should be noted that they cannot directly associate a specific ballot to a specific voter (secret ballot and all that), and just because a ballot has not been confirmed to have been valid, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t. But it is clear that we have as many as 96 provisional ballots in KC that might not have been counted, had they been caste properly… and there is no way to sort them out of the mix.

Can we attribute this to election worker or administrative error? I don’t see how not. While nearly 99 percent of the over 31,000 provisional ballots were cast properly, this is an error for which there is an easy technical solution. In fact, it is so easy, that KC just implemented it in last week’s special levy election: provisional ballots had stickers placed over their barcode so that they could not be scanned at the polling place. Well, duh-uh! I suggest that a more secure solution would be to print provisional ballots with different barcodes, so as to avoid potential tampering with stickers.

Councilmember Steve “The Executioner” Hammond, believes the only way to restore public faith in elections is for “heads to roll,” but as Councilmember Julia Patterson pointed out, King County Elections only has 43 full-time employees… the polls are actually staffed by over 4000 part-time volunteers (they get nominal pay for a 12-hour day), “average citizens who come forth to engage in the democratic process.” These are the “grandmothers” that some council members talked of, and Patterson warned that talk of “heads rolling” would discourage engagement.

Personally, I’m well familiar with these grandmotherly poll workers. My South Seattle polling place has been staffed by the same table of little old ladies since I started voting there seven years ago. If Hammond is patient, I’m sure many of their heads will fall off on their own in short time.

Anyway… while it may not be satisfying to say that “mistakes were made,” and leave it at that, mistakes were made by poll workers — with about one percent of provisional ballots — and now KC Elections has devised a procedure to prevent such mistakes in the future. Problem solved.

As to what this means to Rossi’s contest, well, I’m not sure it means all that much. Remember, in addition to the grandmas, the polls were watched by observers from both parties, including an army of attorneys. If there have been any reports of massive election day fraud regarding provisional ballots, I haven’t heard it. Rossi can’t prove who the 96 ballots were cast for… at the very best, maybe a judge might value average them, taking away about 18 votes from Gregoire’s margin. But I doubt the courts would even go that far.

The 735 No-Signature-On-File Ballots

Isn’t it curious that of all the errors supposedly committed by incompetent KC election workers, the Republicans never mention this one? 735 absentee ballots were improperly left out of the first two counts because signatures had not been scanned into the computer for those voters. After these votes were discovered, the canvassing board verified and counted 566 of them (backed up by a unanimous Supreme Court decision.)

Keep this in mind… part of the Republican mantra (stupid as it may be) is that Rossi “won” two out of three counts. But if these ballots had been properly canvassed the first time around, Gregoire would have won the machine recount… leaving Rossi to pay for a hand recount. As Councilmember Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn profoundly pointed out, “perception is reality.” Imagine how different public perception of this election might be if Gregoire had “won two out of three” counts?

In any case I didn’t hear Hammond asking for heads to roll over this one.

And finally… “The Discrepancy”

What a load of shit.

I was talking to a reporter before the meeting, and he said I had to admit, that intuitively, it looked suspicious. And I did have to admit it… intuitively it does. But only if you don’t understand any of the underlying facts. In fact this “controversy” is based on a false assumption that these two lists were ever intended to reconcile with one another.

To put this in the proper perspective, Councilmember David Irons (hmmm… what’s he running for?) repeated his “recollection” that the 2000 discrepancy at certification was only 17 as “confirmation” that the 2004 number is out of whack. When asked about this after the meeting, Dean Logan questioned what Irons might have been recalling, considering the fact that the voter list isn’t compiled until after certification. (And I’m totally ignoring the bizarre notion that Iron’s 4-year-old “recollection” is more accurate than the actual numbers recorded on file.)

Remember the cries from the right that it was criminally irresponsible to certify this election if the voter list didn’t reconcile with the ballots cast? Kind of hard to make that a condition of certification when the crediting of voters doesn’t occur until afterwards, huh? As Logan made absolutely clear, there is “no legal reconciliation process,” an assertion that has been repeated to me by every auditor’s office I have talked to. The voter list is compiled out of an entirely different process than the count of ballots cast, and for entirely different purposes.

In addition to recording about 600,000 absentee voters, the list is compiled by hand scanning the barcode next to each signed line of over 2600 poll books. If KC Elections could fail to scan the signatures from 735 registration cards, imagine what kind of human error a hand-held scanner introduces into the process. 1,800 misscanned voters is not only understandable, it’s completely consistent with past elections and other jurisdictions. So there.

I don’t really want to expend many more pixels on this issue, as really, it is a legal non-issue… however much the public may have swallowed the righties’ propaganda. But the ever earnest Councilmember Bob Ferguson spent some time trying tease out of Logan that if one precinct had 10 extra voters and another had 10 extra ballots, then that should be a net discrepancy of 20, not zero. (The Snark nodded his head hungrily at this, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing this thesis from the dark side.) But Logan wouldn’t bite, as it ignores a fundamental aspect of voter accreditation.

Over 28,000 provision ballots were counted. And for each one, the ballot was counted in the precinct in which it was cast, where as the voter was credited for voting in the precinct in which he is registered. But if Ferguson’s logic is followed, these 28,000 provisional ballots would create a 56,000 vote discrepancy on their own!

That’s what happens when you try reconcile apples with oranges.

Ah well… I’ve run off at the fingers again. I’ve got a few more observations and comments to make, but I guess I’ll have to save them for Part III.

Before the start of today’s King County Council Meeting, I shook hands with Stefan… and the universe didn’t explode. So I guess us bloggers are just ordinary folk after all.

Anyway….

I didn’t really expect there to be much news generated at this meeting, as it mostly consisted of KC Elections Director Dean Logan presenting his previously released report on the November election. But there actually were a couple issues he cleared up. (At least in my mind… maybe not in the minds of some of the slower councilfolk.)

Military & Overseas Ballots

According to Logan these ballots are one and the same, and they are all mailed in postage paid envelopes provided by the federal government. Thus there is no bulk mail account or third-party mailing house with records to check. They were delivered directly to the post office, by the Oct. 8 deadline… and an internal department log confirms this.

This seemed perfectly clear to me and other members of the audience, but not apparently to Councilmember Kathy Lambert, who followed up by asking Logan if he was aware that the mailing house didn’t send these out until Oct. 13. Um… KC didn’t use a mailing house for these ballots, and Logan repeated that they were mailed out on Oct. 8. Additional military & overseas ballots went out as requests came in.

So as expected, this is a non-issue.

Ballot Enhancement

There have been conflicting reports as to the process by which ballots were enhanced. Some reports say election workers used redacting tape, and then marked over the tape. Some reports claim workers marked the ballots directly. It turns out, both are true.

In cases where the worker could fill in the oval without obscuring the original mark, the ballot was enhanced directly… for example, where the voter circled the oval, and the election worker filled it in. Logan showed a slide illustrating just that. However, where filling in the oval would have obscured the mark — such as in a partially filled in oval — redacting tape was placed over the oval, and then the worker marked the tape. In all cases, the enhancement was done by a two-person team with an observer present, and a log of the changes were kept as required by law.

Just to be sure, I confirmed this with Logan after the meeting. So again… this is a non-issue.

The Felon Vote

Logan says that the department has passed on to the prosecutors office a list of about 100 suspected felon votes. The prosecutor will investigate, and pass on to the sheriff’s office those cases that warrant further investigation. This is the standard procedure, but when asked, Logan did not know of a single case in which a felon has been prosecuted for voting.

Councilmember Steve “I love grandmothers” Hammond attempted to grandstand on this and other issues, demanding “a head to roll” for election worker errors. But as Logan explained, the felon vote was not due to election worker error, as they do not currently have the ability or the authority to perform background checks on registered voters. To back up this claim, Logan cited RCW 29A.08.520:

RCW 29A.08.520
Felony conviction. (Effective until January 1, 2006.)

Upon receiving official notice of a person’s conviction of a felony in either state or federal court, if the convicted person is a registered voter in the county, the county auditor shall cancel the defendant’s voter registration.

That’s it. When the county receives notice from the court of a felony conviction, the felon is removed from the rolls. But there is no statutory authority to do so at any other time, and indeed no way to do so without a centralized database.

Hammond suggested that background checks would fit with the spirit of the law. And newly minted Councilmember Reagan Dunn (who eerily resembles Liev Shreiber’s character in “The Manchurian Candidate”, in both appearance, manner and um… circumstance) took the opportunity to tout his experience as a federal prosecutor in pointing out that, well… I’m not really sure what he was pointing out, except that he put a lot of bad people behind bars and there’s gotta be an awful lot more felons on the rolls than King County realizes.

Which may be true. But what both Hammond and Dunn fail to acknowledge is that it’s all really a moot point. If they were paying attention to Logan’s explanation, and had bothered to read the RCW, they would have noticed that the current statute expires on Jan. 1, 2006, and is replaced with the following:

RCW 29A.08.520
Felony conviction. (Effective January 1, 2006.)

Upon receiving official notice of a person’s conviction of a felony in either state or federal court, if the convicted person is a registered voter in the county, the county auditor shall cancel the defendant’s voter registration. Additionally, the secretary of state in conjunction with the department of corrections shall arrange for a periodic comparison of a list of known felons with the statewide voter registration list. If a person is found on the department of corrections felon list and the statewide voter registration list, the secretary of state or county auditor shall confirm the match through a date of birth comparison and cancel the voter registration from the official state voter registration list. The canceling authority shall send notice of the proposed cancellation to the person at his or her last known voter registration address.

Now maybe I’m naive, but my take is that if the statute actually granted county officials the authority and ability to routinely purge the rolls of felons, the Legislature wouldn’t be adding a provision that grants county officials the authority and ability to routinely purge the rolls of felons. This change is required by the federal HAVA act, and becomes effective by the federal deadline, coinciding with completion by the Secretary of State of the statewide database that makes its provisions possible.

Did felons vote? Sure. Was it King County’s fault? No. Shouldn’t we do something about this? We already are.

So, if Dino Rossi can prove that the felon vote changed the outcome of this election, then I guess he’ll be named governor. But if you’re looking for proof of corruption or incompetence in King County Elections… you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Whew!

I hadn’t meant to write in such detail, so I’m going to post Part I now, and then post Part II upon it’s completion. Coming up… Provisional Ballots and the so-called “Discrepancy.”

[For more information, read King County’s 2004 Elections Report.]

UPDATE:
Read Part II.

Well, now I can’t say (un)Sound Politics has never been useful… it just reminded me that the King County Council will meet to discuss election reform Monday morning, at 9:30 AM, 10th Floor, King County Courthouse. (3rd & James.)

I intend to be there, and apparently… so does Stefan. (But Captain, you just can’t mix matter and antimatter cold!) Watch the universe explode on KCTV.

UPDATE:
Read Part I of my report from the hearing.

Daniel Kirkdorffer over at On The Road to 2008 has gallantly taken on the task of examining (un)Sound Politic’s bizarre obsession with Governor Christine Gregoire’s death threat, and her comment about the level of discussion on talk radio. [“Gregoire’s Feb 3rd Death Threat Comments Revealed“]

Apparently at a loss for new ways to attack the Governor’s legitimacy, the (u)SP folks are reduced to simply attacking her personally. As a sense of normalcy continues to return to Washington politics, expect to see such thoughtful analyses as a biting critique of Gregoire’s hair style, or her daughters’ fashion sense. But for now they’re content to poke fun at the governor for following the WA State Patrol’s recommendations regarding her security.

What (u)SP wants you to believe is that the entire issue is bogus… that there never were any threats, and that Gregoire staged the whole controversy. But this strikes me as more than just an effort to tear down the Governor. The Snark seems so emotionally invested in this non-issue, I wonder if it’s also a rationalization intended to make him feel better about himself?

For I’m sure that he and his cohorts must understand that hateful rhetoric has consequences, and if at some point a less-than-stable individual irrationally acts on the anger the right-wing blogosphere and talk-radio have been plying him with, then… they all share a little responsibility.

The truth is, the level of discourse that has sometimes emanated from the right, has not only been dishonestly propagandistic, but downright disturbing. Their angry thesis is that Gregoire and the Democrats have “stolen” this election, and the exaggerated reaction in the comment threads sometimes borders on threats of violence. Passions and tensions are high, and to imagine that Gregoire and others have not personally received threats, is to lack an imagination at all.

I know. I have received threats myself.

Those who followed this website back during the heady days of the “Horse’s Ass Initiative” might remember a feature I called “Hate Mail Highlights”, in which I poked fun at some of my stupider hate mail by posting it alongside my actual, snide reply. What I didn’t discuss publicly was that along with the many anti-semitic slurs and accusations that I was a communist and a traitor, was the occasional threat of recourse.

Nobody has ever explicitly threatened to kill me.

But there have clearly been efforts to frighten me into shutting up, some subtle, some not. There was the person who emailed me a copy of my credit report… clearly implying that he could fuck with it. There was the person who repeatedly threatened to “out” me (as if I really care if anybody has an accurate impression of my sexual preference other than the person I prefer to have sex with.) And there was the emailer who thanked me for a TV interview I gave, saying that now that he knew my face, he’d “beat it to a bloody pulp” if he ever saw it in public. (He then courteously advised me which Seattle neighborhoods I should avoid.)

Last spring, Tim Eyman sent an email to his list accusing me of sending them viruses, which prompted a number of very angry emails, plus an onslaught of viruses in return. (Tip to e-vandals… I use a Mac.) Several said they reported me to federal and state authorities, and several others threatened to do so. Some threatened to sue me personally. But one individual saw fit to repeatedly call me at home, threatening to come right over and the beat the crap out of me. (Tip to angry phone callers… I have caller ID.)

As tensions rose after the November election, and my blog gained more visibility, my hate mail rose in both volume and, um… volume. One angry missive reminded me that things would all “even out in the end” for while liberals controlled the media, conservatives had “all the guns.” And after I posted a rather harsh critique of the Building Industry Association of Washington, an emailer responded “Builders know how to build houses… we also know how to tear them down.” He then helpfully appended my home address.

I discuss these threats reluctantly — if people think it gets to me, it might only encourage more. But I thought they raised an important point.

I’m just some guy with a strong opinion and a website. If I get personal threats, imagine what kind of crap is sent to the Governor who the right-wing blogs and talk radio have repeatedly accused of stealing this election?

Nobody is denying (u)SP their First Amendment right to hate-mongering. But I repeat, hateful rhetoric has consequences…. and they know it.

Methinks the Snark doest protest too much.

A little tip to anybody who ever communicates with government officials via email… all your private communications are available via a public information request, so you better be on your best behavior. Take for example initiative profiteer Tim Eyman’s embarrassingly snotty tone in an email to Lori Anderson of the Public Disclosure Commission:

Subject: You were specifically instructed
Date: Wed, 2 Feb 2005 16:39:57 -0800
From: “Tim Eyman”
To: “Lori Anderson”
CC: “Susan Harris”

Ms. Anderson, as you can see from the email below, you were specifically instructed to communicate with Mike Fagan and we would handle the situation with Karla Grogan. You specifically violated this specific instruction by calling Karla Grogan today. They charge us for your conversations with them. If you weren’t told to talk with them, that’d be one thing, but you were specifically instructed to not communicate directly with her.

You just cost us a lot of money because you decided to ignore specific instructions from me.

What do you have to say about it?

Regards, Tim Eyman, ph: 425-493-9127, email: insignia@greekwatch.com

I’ll tell you what I have to say about it, Tim: eat me.

The PDC charges us taxpayers for their time, so if the quickest and best way for Lori to do her job is to speak directly to your accountant, then I say too damn bad for you. That’s just a cost of doing business.

I’ve been known to criticize the PDC for their lax enforcement attitude towards Timmy’s many transgressions. But as somebody who has actually filed PDC reports myself, I have to say that their customer service to filers is outstanding. They bend over backwards to help people like me and Tim file our reports accurately and on time, and have always been polite, courteous and prompt.

Tim needs to check his attitude at the door.

(Oh… and why do I have a copy of this email? I’ll get to that later.)

Carla and TorridJoe have posted to their respective websites part two of “Fisking Sharkansky”, an examination of the relative “discrepancy” rates in sixteen Washington counties. Their findings seriously undermine charges of gross negligence being thrown at King County by the Rossi campaign and our (un)friends at (un)Sound Politics. You can read the post at Preemptive Karma and Also Also.

Notice Spokane County. Rossi won this county easily. Total voters are fewer than one fourth of King County’s. But they have twice as many errors as King per voter. Moreover, their discrepancy represents more voters than ballots, a condition which Sharkansky claimed lacked plausibility as a type of honest error. However Spokane is apparently a Republican leaning county

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Right-wing bloggers like to imagine themselves as watchdogs on the MSM. But who’s watchdogging the watchdogs? Oh well, I guess today, it’s my turn again. And the dog of the day is recently-knighted (un)Sound Politics contributor, Timothy Goddard.

Writing on his own blog (“PI on taxes: Slow on the uptake, wrong on the facts“), Timothy is so eager to cleverly debunk a Seattle P-I article as thinly disguised “propaganda”, that he makes himself look downright silly.

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer is bringing new meaning to the term “Post.” “Post,” as in “after,” as in “already happened,” as in “old news.” To set up the Democrats’ no-doubt forthcoming attempt to impose an income tax on the state, replacing the sales tax, the paper is reporting a nine year old study as breaking news.

The propaganda thinly disguised as an article entitled “Sales tax hits state’s poor where it hurts

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Initiative 892 — which would have put 19,000 slot machines into over 2000 neighborhood bars, restaurants and bowling alleys — was defeated this November by a 60-40 margin. So how does the Washington State Lottery Commission react to voters’ overwhelming rejection of what would have been the most dramatic expansion of gambling in state history? Well according to Peter Callaghan in The News Tribune, by preparing for the most dramatic expansion of gambling in state history, of course! [“Lottery prepares its computers for fantasy future“]

In seeking bids for a new computer system to operate its online games like Lotto, Quinto and Mega Millions, the Lottery wants the successful bidder to be prepared to run lots of new games that are currently illegal in Washington

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I’ll be on the air with Kirby Wilbur, KVI-570, Friday morning at 6:30 AM, breaking the news to Rossi supporters that he lost the election. (Somebody’s got to do it.)

I’ve already commented on Stefan Sharkansky — the Jeff Gannon Jim Guckert of the Washington press corps — rudely heckling Ron Sims at a press conference yesterday. The Snark snidely blogged about the “hails of derisive laughter” at Sims claim that the November election “had an accuracy rate that any bank would envy.” What Snark doesn’t tell his readers is that the laughter came solely (and deliberately) from him and one fellow malcontent.

Perhaps one of the reasons the assembled media didn’t laugh at the comparison, is that it’s not all that laughable. As TorridJoe and Daniel Kirkdorffer point out on their respective blogs (Also Also and On the Road to 2008), the banking system is not as error free as one might expect, and Washington state elections not quite so error prone as the righties make it out to be.

Both Joe and Daniel site an article by Bank Technology News, that says errors account for about 0.2 percent of online transactions.

“There is always going to be an error rate that they have to live with,” notes Beth Robertson, senior analyst at TowerGroup. But she says rates are remarkably low and roughly half of what they were in 2001. Nonetheless, a 0.2 percent rate is still about 3.4 million payment mistakes that occur either because of customer error or some other glitch in the system, including problems stemming from billers who may switch bank accounts and fail to notify banks so they can change the routing of customer payments. Banks also may fail to cancel a recurring payment either because the request wasn’t processed in time or the customer didn’t make the change correctly on the front end.

Hmmm… 0.2 percent? Doesn’t that come to a 99.8 percent accuracy rate, exactly the rate Snark claims for King County elections?

Daniel takes his analysis further, pointing out the similarities between the types of banking errors described, and those alleged during our recent election.

So the banking systems seem to be plagued the same type of errors we’ve seen in the elections:

-customer error , much like voters who couldn’t fill out their ballots correctly, or didn’t sign them.

-glitches , not unlike voting machines that counted wrong, or lost votes, or couldn’t read valid votes marked in pencil.

-switched bank accounts , kind of like change of addresses.

-failure to cancel a recurring payment , similar to deaths that went unrecorded, and felons who were kept on the voter lists.

That’s pretty uncanny!

The article sums it up by saying, “the equation will likely never be perfect.” .

Of course, online banking isn’t the only area where errors occur in our financial system. Identity theft has become the largest category of fraud, and the fuel behind our nation’s multi-billion dollar credit card fraud racket. The banks are reluctant to release actual fraud rates, but some foreign credit cards are estimated to have rates as high as 0.47 percent! And according to Jupiter Media Metrix, worldwide credit card fraud rates range between 25 cents and 28 cents out of every $100.00 US charged online.

If King County’s election truly was 99.8 percent accurate (as the mathematically infallible Snark argues) then Ron Sims and Dean Logan have the right to be proud. Not only was it more accurate than the banking system, but it was also far more accurate than the 0.5 percent margin the Caltech/MIT Voter Technology Project recommends as the threshold for automatic recounts.

I’m not saying there isn’t room for improvement. The King County Council will be holding an open session on election reform (Monday, 9:30 AM, Council Chambers), and I encourage everybody who cares about this issue to be there. Hopefully, those attending will contribute more to the discussion than just jeers, heckles, and derisive laughter.

Columbian Watch does itself a great disservice with the blog’s modest tagline: “Keeping an eye on the Worst Little Newspaper West of the Mississippi.” CW’s scope is actually much larger… and it is surely one of the best researched, best written political blogs in the state. I’ve bookmarked it, and so should you.

For example, take today’s latest installment in CW’s multi-part expose on the exploits of Vancouver’s M.J. Murdock Charitable Trust, and the right-wing faux-think-tanks it funds. Amongst the Murdock Trust’s beneficiaries are a rogue’s gallery of Washington state propaganda mills, including the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, the Washington Policy Center, and yes… Seattle’s very own Archbishop Wilberforce Discovery Institute.

The battle over so-called “Intelligent Design,” the far right’s latest attempt to shove their religion down our throats, is not being advanced by lone fundamentalist lunatics showing up at school boards. It is being financed and promoted by wealthy right-wing foundations, none more so than Washington’s own Discovery Institute, headquartered in Seattle.

“Intelligent Design” has become such a focus for the Discover Institute, that they have actually created a separate division devoted to the cause, the Orwellian-named Center for the Renewal of Science and Culture.

And the “Center for Science and Culture” found its target last year in Clark County by publishing an anti-evolution screed in The Spring Hill Review, which Clark County residents may recognize as the free “arts” tabloid they find lying around auto-body shops and elsewhere:

Curiously, guess who wrote that screed? None other than (un)Sound Politics co-conspirator Seth Cooper. (Who, to his credit, did root for the Eagles in the Super Bowl.) Ah, what a tangled web we weave.

The whole point of CW’s expose is summed up nicely in the closing paragraph of the first installment:

Philanthropy has a long history in this country, but someone is going to have to explain to me how it constitutes “charitable giving” to support the overtly political operations of EFF, and perhaps more importantly, how progressives are going to convince the media to stop giving EFF and their funders a free ride.

In fact, just the other day I nearly choked when I heard Paul Guppy introduced on KUOW as being from the “non-partisan, free-market think tank, the Washington Policy Center.” Um… doesn’t that description imply that it is partisan towards free-market policies?

These fake think tanks have been setting the terms of the debate in our state for far too long. We need to either convince the MSM to cover these jokers as the propagandists they really are… or we need to create our own “non-partisan progressive think tank.”

Anybody have a couple million dollars lying around?