HorsesAss.Org

I’ve enjoyed my pissing match with Stephan at (un)Sound Politics over the accuracy of voting technologies, and whether we can ever really know who won the governor’s race in a statistically meaningful way. And I’m enjoying it even more now that the Seattle Times has weighed in (“Top vote-getter? We may never truly know“) just a day after our dueling rebuttals. (His… mine.)

“It’s closer than the technology and our capacity as humans to decipher,” said Jeffery Mondak, a political-science professor at Florida State University. “You folks would do as well to flip a coin as to try to determine who actually won.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Oh wait… I did!

Read ’em and weep, Stefan.

[NOTE: so as not to disrupt the ongoing debate in the comment thread I am updating this posting to reflect my rebuttal. Comments are now open again on Sound Politics.]

Last week I posted an analysis based on several studies from the CalTech/MIT Voter Technology Project: Heads or tails… why we’ll never know who really won the governor’s race.”

In a critique of my analysis, posted today on neoconservative blog Sound Politics (“Horsing around with statistics“), Stefan Sharkansky seems to pursue two distinct theses: a) that Dino Rossi will be the “statistical winner” regardless of any likely outcome of the third count, and b) that I am stupid… or at the very least, an unreliable (if “occasionally entertaining”) source of information and analysis.

While I appreciate the compliment part of his closing, backhanded compliment, I hope Stefan understands if I stray from the dispassioned tone of my original analysis to engage him on a more equal rhetorical footing. For if you deconstruct his critique you will find that it is built on three of the main pillars of pop-neocon discourse: Dismissiveness, Misrepresentation, and Confusion.

Dismissiveness

And now thanks to David, we have even more uninformed debate.

He discusses a couple of research papers, which he apparently read, but didn’t understand very well;

First, I’d just like to point out that the very existence of Stefan’s critique disproves his first statement. My research was in response to contradictory numbers irresponsibly being bandied about as to the relative accuracy of vote counting technology in general, and hand recounts in particular. And due to my initiative, we now have two competing analyses referencing the highly respected CalTech/MIT studies. (And we don’t need a spreadsheet to count ’em.)

I made a point of encouraging people to read the studies for themselves, and apparently Stefan followed my lead. So I’d think Stefan would congratulate me for contributing to an informed debate… unless by “informed” he prefers “informed by rumor and innuendo.”

Misrepresentation

David then announces the following conclusions, none of which are correct in the context of the Washington gubernatorial vote:

Stefan then goes on to list my four “erroneous claims” (I’ll discuss them separately in a moment), before definitively stating:

Again, all of David’s statements 1 – 4 are incorrect.

Stefan lists his interpretation of my “conclusions”, out of context, and in his words. But notice how clever he is in reinforcing my wrongness. At the top of the list he states that my so-called conclusions are incorrect “in the context of”, but at the bottom, he drops the caveat: “Again, all of David’s statements 1 – 4 are incorrect.”

(I’d say this also falls under the category of “Dismissiveness” but why pick nits?)

I may not have a background in statistics, but I sure as hell know language, and while Stefan might object to my quibbling over his sentence structure, he is well aware of how his readers will interpret that line: these are “David’s statements” and they are “incorrect.”

So let’s be clear about what I wrote. I attempted to answer several questions regarding the general accuracy of voting technologies, using the best research available, and in doing so, I presented the conclusions of the CalTech/MIT studies. I also attempted to define the terminology as best I could.

In an 1172 word essay, I didn’t mention the current WA election until word 976, and the only conclusion that I presented as my own was that a 42 vote margin out of 2.8 million cast was statistically meaningless given the margin of error.

So, let’s take a look at all my statements of error.

1. The “Residual voting” rate (includes both blank and improperly marked ballots), which he calls “the primary statistical measure of the performance and accuracy of voting technologies” is 1 – 2%.

“He calls”… sheesh! In the words of CalTech/MIT:

A number of important studies of the performance and accuracy of voting technologies have sought to measure the error rate of vote tabulations. The main metric that emerges from these evaluations uses “residual votes” — the discrepancy between total ballots cast and votes cast for a particular office, such as president or governor. The incidence of residual votes should be unrelated to the type of technology used, and the difference in residual votes across technologies measures the extent to which errors in the casting or tabulation of votes are attributable to specific technology. Similar jurisdictions using different technologies ought to have the same residual vote rate, on average. By this metric, hand-counted paper ballots and optically scanned ballots have shown the better overall performance than punch cards, lever machines, and electronic voting machines.

Stefan further denigrates my analysis by dismissing residual votes as a meaningful statistic at all, “Furthermore, all indications are that the vast majority of blank ballots were really intended to be left blank.” Um… that’s not what the studies say:

Roughly one third of the residual vote, then, is pure tabulation error. The remainder is either unrecoverable ballots (i.e., people who accidentally voted twice) or blank ballots.

So yes, Stefan, residual voting rates are indeed “the primary statistical measure of the performance and accuracy of voting technologies.” That’s not my conclusion, that is CalTech/MIT’s. Furthermore, roughly one third of these residual votes represent tabulation error. And as to their relative performance:

Punch cards and electronic machines register residual voting rates for president of approximately 3 percent of all ballots cast. Paper ballots, lever machines, and optically scanned ballots produce residual voting rates of approximately 2 percent of all ballots cast, a statistically significant difference of fully one percent.

So tell me… exactly what is it that I didn’t understand about the studies on this particular point?

Let’s see… where else did I go wrong? Oh yeah…

2. The error rate of machine counting (“tabulation error rate”) is 0.56% for optical scanning machines.

I wrote “the study found the tabulation invalidation rate was .83 percent for paper and .56 percent for optical scanning”… and that is exactly what the study found. Vindication!

3. He infers from (2) that

A .5 percent invalidation rate in a gubernatorial election with over 2.8 million votes cast amounts to 14,000 erroneous votes!

I just double-checked my math, and 2.8 million times .5 percent still equals 14,000. Maybe the discrepancy is that you are using Excel, and Microsoft is known for buggy software?

Okay, maybe “erroneous” was the wrong word. But here’s the statement from which I inferred the 14,000 figure:

In a US House election with 250,000 votes, the invalidation rate of .005 for scanners amounts to 1250 votes. The tabulation errors may swing toward any of the contestants in a recount. Assuming a uniform distribution of tabulation errors, any race decided by less than .5 percent of the vote will have a non-trivial probability of being reversed in a recount.

And unlike Stefan, I didn’t place this inference out of context. It appeared right below the block-quote above. And by the way, I can’t find a reliable citation, but Paul Berendt keeps talking about the 15,000 votes that changed between the count and recount… a remarkably close match to what the historical data would predict, thank you very much.

I just want to take a moment here to clarify something about tabulation error rates, because there seemed to be some confusion in earlier comments. This metric has nothing to do with the accuracy of recounts. It is merely a measure of the accuracy of the original, “preliminary” count.

Oh, and my last so-called “conclusion”…

4. Finally, he claims that “Republicans scoff at Gregoire calling this election a tie, but statistically speaking, it is.”

Well that one is my conclusion, and I stand by it.

And this really gets to the gist of Stefan’s entire rebuttal… the fact that he stubbornly insists that a 42 vote margin out of 2.8 million is not only a statistically meaningful victory, but a mandate for sweeping change in Olympia.

Which brings us to…

Confusion

My primary objective was to try to make a complex issue less confusing, and Stefan’s objective seems to be the opposite.

I explained that hand-counted paper ballots are as accurate as optically scanned ballots, and significantly more accurate than punch card ballots and electronic voting machines. I tried to explain how a machine that certifies as accurate to one in one million could possibly lose one vote in one hundred (one third the 3% residual rate for punch card ballots) due to “pure tabulation error.” What I failed to do was find data on the relative accuracy of hand counting optical and punch card ballots.

In the process I came to the conclusion that the margin of victory in this gubernatorial election was too far within the margin of error of any of the voting systems used, to discern the will of the people to any statistically meaningful degree of certainty.

And this is the only assertion that Stefan seems interested in refuting, though in doing so he saw fit to trash my entire analysis… that I don’t understand math, that I’m contributing to creating an “uninformed debate”, that my “conclusions” are wrong, and that I didn’t understand the studies that I “apparently” read.

First he dismisses me as unqualified to engage in the debate. Then he misrepresents my statements by taking them out of context. And finally, he relies on the the ultimate weapon of mass confusion: statistics.

Now I know that seems like a funny charge to be leveled by somebody whose entire argument is based on statistics. But there’s a big difference: I didn’t try to calculate any of this crap myself… after all, I read phrases like “regression analysis” and I think it has something to do with how my psychiatrist father could always make me feel like I was still thirteen.

Instead, I relied on the conclusions of carefully weighted statistical analyses of detailed historical data from CalTech/MIT, two of the most prestigious technical universities in the world.

Whereas Stefan wants us to rely on… Stefan Sharkansky and his cranky old copy of Microsoft Excel.

I could really give a shit about all his t-distributions and null hypotheses and probability whojamacallits, because even if I could do the math (and I can’t), and even if I trusted him to present honest calculations (and I most certainly don’t)… I’m an experienced enough computer programmer to understand one basic axiom: garbage in, garbage out.

The CalTech/MIT studies are based on years of historical data, whereas Stefan uses a single data point: incomplete results from WA’s 2004 gubernatorial election… results that we have no idea are even close to accurate… after all, that’s the whole damned point of the recount, isn’t it?

No, instead Stefan wants you to believe in the miraculous proposition that King County’s vote tabulations were somehow five to ten times more accurate than national historical averages… a particularly amusing notion coming from a man who has spent much of the past few weeks angrily promoting unsupported conspiracy theories about how KC Dems are stealing the election!

But Stefan’s most incredibly preposterous “calculation” is that even if Gregoire were to win the third count by 250 votes, “statistics would still favor Rossi,” a conclusion he comes to by plotting the results of all three counts.

Don’t you get it Stefan? THE FIRST COUNT WAS WRONG! That’s why we do recounts in close races. According to CalTech/MIT:

Tabulations may change from the initial count to the recount for a variety of reasons: ballots may be mishandled; machines may have difficulty reading markings; people and machines may make tabulation errors. Because recounts are used to certify the vote, greater effort is taken to arrive at the most accurate accounting of the ballots cast. The initial count of ballots, then is treated as a preliminary count, and the recount as the official.

Consistently read their blog and you’d think Stefan and his neocon cohorts apparently believe the sole purpose of our state’s recount provision is to specifically disadvantage Republicans.

But according to CalTech/MIT, the results of a recount are more accurate than the original, and thus it seems likely that the results of the second recount will be more accurate than the results of the first.

I am tempted to continue trashing Stefan’s reasoning in the manner in which he trashed mine, but instead I choose to end this on a note of conciliation. In between calling me stupid, and attempting to snow readers with bullshit numbers and technical jargon, Stefan made one, tempered statement I can agree with entirely:

I do agree with David that our current voting system is prone to inaccuracies, and that we’re not going to emerge from the hand recount with confidence that we measured the will of the voters with ball-bearing precision. I hope after this whole mess we can actually work together for meaningful election reform.

Personally, I intend to try to do something about this mess, and I hope we can all put are partisan differences aside in an attempt to restore faith in our electoral system.

As reported in the Seattle Times (and nearly everywhere else), the WA State Democrats delivered a $730,000 check to the Secretary of State’s office today, and officially requested an unprecedented statewide hand recount of over 2.8 million ballots cast in the governor’s race.

The party also filed suit in the state Supreme Court, seeking a ruling that would allow all ballots cast to be considered, not just those counted in the previous two counts. Republicans are calling this a “nuclear bomb”, but the issue at hand is really very simple.

RCW 29A.64.011 states the following:

An officer of a political party or any person for whom votes were cast at any election may file a written application for a recount of the votes or a portion of the votes cast at that election for all candidates for election to that office.

And RCW 29A.64.050 further specifies:

a complete recount of all ballots cast for the office

What the Democrats are asking for is a ruling on what actually constitutes “all ballots cast”. Is it actually all the ballots cast in the election, or only those ballots already counted? The Democrats would like to start from scratch, as if the election just occurred, and reexamine the signatures of those absentee and provisional ballots previously ruled invalid. Seems reasonable enough.

D’s are also asking for a consistent standard to be applied across all counties in regard to signature matching on absentee and provisional ballots. The so-called “threatening letter” the D’s sent Wednesday to the Secretary of State alleges that King County rejected over 1500 absentee ballots and hundreds of provisional ballots because signatures did not sufficiently match those on record, yet a few counties “admitted candidly that they did not review the provisional ballot signatures at all.”

Republicans argue that a “recount” involves counting again something that has been counted before, and thus only those ballots counted the last time around should be reexamined… a reasonable definition of the word, but alas, one that does not appear in the RCW. This definition is further undermined by the fact that first “recount” included hundreds of ballots that were not part of the original “count.”

So, which way will the Supremes rule, if they rule at all? Hell if I know, for while I’m fairly competent at reading the law, I am — much to my mother’s chagrin — not an attorney. But either way, it doesn’t sound to me like the “nuclear bomb” the R’s are making it out to be.

The AP is reporting that Washington State Democrats have raised the money needed for a statewide hand recount, and have called a 2PM news conference to announce their intentions.

More later.

For a great example of how the righties are trying to weave innuendo and selective quotation into a massive, Democratic, vote-fraud conspiracy, take a look at the exchange over a recent blog on Sound Politics.

An “anonymous” poster, X, who had helped D’s collect signed affidavits in King County, had posted a series of comments explaining the process, assuming he was contributing to a reasoned public debate. And Stefan chose to twist his words into evidence of malfeasance.

I encourage you to read the rightfully indignant response from X, who begins with:

Well, congratulations. You got rid of me.

[UPDATE: Oh man… and now they’re equating voting with murder: Count Every Murder]

Growing up a Philadelphia Eagles fan, I have been conditioned to always expect disappointment. Even in this 10-1 season, with the rest of the NFC playing like… well, the Seahawks… I can’t help but expect a sudden collapse. Up 21 points at the two minute warning I sit there calculating how much time it would take for the other team to run three touchdowns and two onside kicks.

And so I have some empathy for the Mad Aluminum Hatters at conservative blog Sound Politics, whose wailing and gnashing over evil Democratic plans to “steal” the election grows louder the longer Dino Rossi holds the lead. WA Republicans are also conditioned to expect the worst, and so they’ve been following this election the way I watch football: a paranoid delusional yelling at the refs for every imagined transgression, cursing the fact that 10am is just too damn early to crack open a beer.

Take the latest brouhaha over the letter Democratic attorneys sent to Secretary of State Sam Reed. As reported in the Seattle P-I:

Meanwhile, Republicans are fuming about a letter the Democrats sent to Secretary of State Sam Reed on Wednesday.

The five-page letter threatens legal action even before the recount begins if Reed does not “make it clear in (his) hand recount guidelines that ballots previously rejected by canvassing boards or election staff should be reviewed again.”

Speaking on the behalf of Rossi and the Republicans, former Gov. Dan Evans said both the request and threat were outrageous.

“This is not a letter from someone who wants to find the truth; it’s from someone who desperately wants to change the results,” Evans said.

Hmmm. Could it be possible Dan, that Gregoire wants to find the truth and desperately wants to change the results?

Yeah, I know, Dan’s just being a loyal Republican, but I wonder if he’d be so comfortable playing the spin game if saw how dizzy things were getting over on the conservative blogs? For the past few weeks they’ve been describing Democratic efforts with words like “steal”, “illegitimate”, “corrupt”, and yes… “haruspex.” He’s before my time, but I’m familiar with the phrase “Dan Evans Republican” being used to describe a moderate member of the state GOP (you know, like what Rossi pretended to be during the campaign.) So by “moderate” are we talking about the following hyperbole from our friend Stefan at Sound Politics?

In short, by attempting to overturn the decision of Washington’s voters with a less accurate vote count, Christine Gregoire and the Democrats have declared a form of civil war on the people of this state. They are morally equivalent to the corrupt Ukrainian autocrats who have tried to steal the election from its rightful winners in the opposition.

Yeah, whatever, aluminum hat boy.

And if you think the conservative bloggers are incendiary, you should see the comments they generate from readers, like the following reasoned piece of discourse posted yesterday:

If the Democrats really want a war over who’s the next Governor of Washington, they might want to remember that the nation’s military overwhelmingly supported President Bush….

Uh-oh. I better check the weather forecast for Guantanamo.

Anyway, as to that “threatening” letter from Democratic attorneys… here, read it for yourself. Ooooh… scary!

Now, I’ve received some threatening letters, and this one doesn’t even come close. (Hell… I’ve even been sued by Christine Gregoire!)

This is what lawyers do. It’s just standard operating procedure, trying to squeeze the most favorable counting rules they can get out of a Republican Secretary of State. And you can be sure Rossi’s people are attempting the same.

Indeed, the Rossi campaign has not ruled out legal challenges if he loses the hand count.

“I don’t know exactly what would happen if the election results were overturned,” Lane said. “It would be highly unusual, and we would have to explore all our options.

As they should.

In the meanwhile, the righties can yell all they want about us evil, election-stealing Democrats. If the tables were turned, and God forbid my candidate was winning instead of theirs, I’d be screaming bloody murder too. But then, I’m an Eagles fan… so I’m nuts.

With a hand recount looming in our historically close gubernatorial election, there has been much debate over the relative accuracy of hand counts versus machine counts, and the error rate of vote counting technologies in general… most of it uninformed.

In my typically wonkish fashion I decided to dive into the most technical research I could find, and tediously share my gleanings with you. My primary source is the CalTech/MIT Voter Technology Project, and much of my data is drawn from the following reports:

Using Recounts to Measure the Accuracy of Vote Tabulations: Evidence from New Hampshire Elections 1946-2002

Residual Votes Attributable to Technology: An Assessment of the Reliability of Existing Voting Technology

Conflicting numbers regarding the error rate of voting machines have been tossed about in partisan blogs, the news media, and the John Carlson Show (which doesn’t really fall into either category.) On the one hand, the certification standard for voting machines in Washington state is indeed one failure in one million. But it is also true that the residual vote rate — the primary statistical measure of the performance and accuracy of voting technologies — is one to two votes in one hundred.

The residual vote rate is the difference between total ballots cast, and votes counted for a particular office, such as president or governor; these residual votes represent the “over” and “under” votes we hear about. And it is this measure that is significant in comparing competing technologies.

The fact that the counting machines themselves are virtually flawless is meaningless in the context of the larger discussion, because they are only flawless in counting flawlessly prepared ballots. For example, both optical scan and punch card machines will test to the same high certification standards, yet the average residual vote rate for punch card ballot systems is nearly double that for optical scan.

The large performance difference between the two systems is due, not to mechanical failure, but to a higher rate of “human error” by those voters using the punch card ballot system versus those using optical scan. This is a reflection of the way people relate to the particular technology… a concept that should be well familiar to user interface designers, or anyone who has ever manned the technical support line at a software company.

Indeed, Direct Recording Electronic devices (DREs) — including the touch-screen voting machines to which many counties are switching — have amongst the highest residual vote rates of all existing technologies, despite the fact they are programmed to make over-votes (voting for multiple candidates in the same race) impossible, and always tabulate ballots with 100% accuracy. (Or so Diebold tells us.) Meanwhile, hand-counted paper ballots, which provide no safeguard against over-votes, and risk introducing human error into the counting process, have one of the lowest residual vote rates.

Thus it is not the counting machine that introduces statistically significant error into the voting system, but rather the interface by which voters are asked to mark the ballot. It has become popular for bloggers and columnists to criticize voters for not following instructions, but when one voting technology produces error rates twice that of another, the technology deserves part of the blame. And clearly, voters in counties using punch card systems are being disenfranchised at rates nearly twice that of those in counties using optical scan… and at a rate well outside the margin of error in our gubernatorial election. (I’ll get to that in a moment.)

As to the relative accuracy of the various voting technologies, the CalTech/MIT studies found that voting systems fell into two clusters: paper ballots, lever machines and optical scanned ballots produced residual voting rates of one to two percent. Punch card and electronic voting methods produced rates of approximately three percent.

So, are hand counts accurate? According to the studies, hand counts are at least as accurate as lever machines and optical scanners, and significantly more accurate than punch card and electronic voting systems. In fact, when looking at counties that switched from one technology to another and comparing the resulting residual vote rates, the study found that while the overall results were consistent with other analyses…

Paper might even be an improvement over lever machines and scanners.

CalTech/MIT also explores a second measure of accuracy, tabulation validation rate — the agreement between initial counts and recounts of ballots in contested elections. This metric is less useful as a comparative tool, because it cannot be used to measure mechanical (lever) and electronic voting machines, as there are no ballots to recount. And the study in question only compared hand-counted paper ballots with optically scanned ballots.

The study found the tabulation invalidation rate was .83 percent for paper and .56 percent for optical scanning. Thus the discrepancy between the initial count and the recount was less for optical scan than for hand-counted paper.

To be honest, I’m not sure what, if anything, this says about the relative accuracy of hand recounting optical scan ballots, let alone punch cards. And here’s the part that might piss some people off… I’m not sure it even matters.

For what this study does tell us is that even the most accurate voting technology still is not accurate enough:

Considering these tabulation errors, how confident should we be in vote counts, and when should we have a recount? The tabulation invalidation rate was low, especially for optical scanning. However, it was not trivial. In a US House election with 250,000 votes, the invalidation rate of .005 for scanners amounts to 1250 votes. The tabulation errors may swing toward any of the contestants in a recount. Assuming a uniform distribution of tabulation errors, any race decided by less than .5 percent of the vote will have a non-trivial probability of being reversed in a recount.

A .5 percent invalidation rate in a gubernatorial election with over 2.8 million votes cast amounts to 14,000 erroneous votes! With only 42 votes separating the two candidates, no counting method can accurately tell us who really got the most votes.

Republicans scoff at Gregoire calling this election a tie, but statistically speaking, it is. This election is so far within the margin of error, that there is no practical way to accurately determine the winner.

Thus, the results of the third count — whether hand or machine — will be just as meaningless as the results of the first two.

Republicans argue that “winning” the first two counts gives Rossi legitimacy. It doesn’t. It’s like flipping a coin and having it land on heads two times in a row.

And Democrats argue that a hand recount will more accurately determine the winner. It can’t. This race is simply too close to call. We’ll never know who really got the most votes.

Fortunately, the law does prescribe an endgame. Gregoire will request a hand recount, and whoever “wins” that, will be governor.

And who do I think is gonna win? Flip a coin.

[Linking here from (un)Sound Politics? You can comment directly on Stefan’s critique, or join a discussion here: “Lies, damn lies, and statistics.”]

According to a “reliable source” several tribes have agreed to contribute about $100,000 to the Gregoire campaign to help cover the costs of a hand recount.

(Hmmm… do you think Tim Eyman would have ponied up some of his hard earned panhandled cash to help Rossi pay for a recount?)

Now I’m sure folks like Timmy and the aluminum milliners at Sound Politics are going to whine about the tribes trying to “buy an election” or some bullshit spin like that. But it’s a political contribution like any other, and I don’t hear the righties complaining when the BIAW spends half-a-million putting a justice on the State Supreme Court.

Anyway, the point is, despite Paul Berendt pleading poverty, the D’s are on their way to raising the money necessary; news reports claim the Democratic Governor’s Association, EMILY’s List and the Democratic National Committee have also made financial commitments. Whether the D’s ask for a full or partial recount depends on how much money they raise by the Friday deadline.

Either way, there is definitely going to be a hand recount.

[Hey visitor from Sound Politics, take a gander at this: Heads or tails… why we’ll never know who really won the governor’s race]

The Seattle Times reports today that outgoing Gov. Gary Locke has said there should be a full, statewide recount in the race to succeed him.

And once that count is done, he said, all sides should agree the race is over.

Um, Gary… once that count is done, state law (Chapter 29A.64 RCW) says that the race is over.

In other news, Secretary of State Sam Reed has apparently certified the results of the election, declaring Diana Dino Rossi the governor-elect. Whether or not he actually becomes governor will inevitably depend on the outcome of the hand recount.

With a statistically meaningless 42 vote margin out of 2.8 million votes cast, the governor’s race is still a crap shoot.

The following label really does appear on laptop bags, briefcases and backpacks from Port Angeles and Seattle based Tom Bihn Designs:

The French care instructions translate as follows:

Wash with warm water
Use mild soap
Dry flat
Do not use bleach
Do not dry in the dryer
Do not iron
We are sorry that
Our President is an idiot
We did not vote for him

A precinct-level analysis by the Seattle Times revealed that President Bush’s support slipped from 2000 in Eastside suburbs, including some of the ritzier neighborhoods. [Bush’s Eastside support slipped]

This is not just a local phenomena; even while Republicans have cemented their hold on an ever expanding red exurbia, close-in suburbs have been gradually shifting Democratic. For example, in Philadelphia’s affluent Main Line — a longtime bastion of “Rockefeller Republicanism” — Kerry carried some precincts by historic margins as Republicans finally seemed to realize that the national party left them years ago. And in traditionally Republican Mercer Island, Democrats now hold two out of the three legislative seats.

To me, this is one of the few hopeful signs that came out of an otherwise bleak election season. And it suggests a strategy for rebuilding a Democratic majority.

Just like the Democrats lost their base in the South with their support of civil rights legislation in the sixties, the GOP risks alienating their moderate, suburban base by abandoning fiscal conservatism to focus on right-wing social issues at home, and military and economic imperialism abroad. The neo-cons may dominate the national Republican leadership, but they do not represent the majority of suburban voters.

Families move to places like Mercer Island for better public schools, cleaner streets, safer neighborhoods, and all the other public services that a higher property tax base provides. These are people who believe in government because they benefit from it every day, and they routinely tax themselves to pay for the services they want.

These are people with whom urban Democrats have common ground, and we have an opportunity to exploit the wedge the neo-cons have provided, to expand our base politically and geographically. For in addition to a shared belief that good government is necessary to maintaining a high quality of life, suburban and city voters have a mutual interest in maintaining an economically and culturally vibrant urban core.

I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia, yet I always considered myself a Philadelphian; it is this larger sense of community that Democrats must encourage in metropolitan areas around the nation if we are to have a hope of expanding our political base. To do so we must continue to be a party of progressive ideals, while remaining tempered by fiscal responsibility. We must focus on efficiently providing the level of public services voters demand, by maintaining an adequate and fair tax structure.

And urban Democrats must do a better job of reaching out across the city line to work with our suburban neighbors on solving our regional problems. I’m not suggesting compromise as a political expediency, but rather the type of collaborative engagement that fosters consensus and creativity. We’re both trying to improve education, reduce traffic, increase public safety, etc… if throwing money at a problem isn’t the only solution, then perhaps Seattle has something to learn from Mercer Island?

On the larger, divisive social issues that Republicans all too often successfully exploit to their advantage, Democrats must learn a rhetorical lesson from the opposition, and deconstruct these debates to the real world choices that people understand. For example, if the abortion debate remains a choice between dead and mangled fetuses versus a vague and unwritten Constitutional “right to privacy”, abortion foes will win. But when the public is faced with a choice between dead fetuses and young women dying of sepsis from back-alley abortions… well… that’s the kind of brutally compelling argument that led to legalized abortion in the first place.

But Democrats must also recognize that there are some issues on which we are clearly in the minority, and we must not replicate the Republican leadership’s penchant for arrogantly ramming an unwanted social agenda down the throats of the public. Political leadership is not about giving voters what they want, or what we want. It is about patiently and persuasively building a consensus where none existed before.

Democrats must not shy away from voicing their support for issues like gay marriage — if that is what they truly believe — but to attempt to impose gay marriage on an unwilling public through legislation or litigation is to invite the sort of costly political backlash we saw in the November election. The legal protections of civil union may be the least we can offer to committed, unmarried couples… but at the moment, it may also be the most.

Of course, a precinct-level analysis can be a little like reading tea leaves or entrails, and I wouldn’t want my right-wing friends at Sound Politics to label me a political haruspex. In the end, voters tend to vote for candidates, not issues, and so divining demographic trends from a single election can be misleading. After all, our state GOP is making a big deal about the so-called “Dinocrats” who may have cost Gregoire the gubernatorial election, but few are suggesting that this portends Washington turning red in 2008.

What I do know is that moderate suburban Republicans are increasingly willing to buck party loyalty and vote for Democratic candidates, representing a clear opportunity for Democrats to permanently expand their base. There is an urge to look at the huge swath of red on the electoral map and ask if we need to redefine the Democratic Party to appeal to this disaffected middle America.

But for a party firmly rooted in our nation’s urban centers, a potential Democratic majority can be found much closer to home. In fact, it’s just across the city line.

In the unlikely event I ever run for office, I’m likely to rue my penchant for criticizing the opinions of the Seattle Times editorial board. (Hell, I’m likely to rue half of what I write here.) I just hope they give me credit for the times I highlight my agreement with them.

Like today’s editorial: “Congress overreached in IRS oversight gambit.”

The bill gives agents of appropriations chairmen access to Internal Revenue Service facilities and “any tax returns or return information contained therein.”

Now that is scary.

It certainly is. In the words of Lord Acton: “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

But then, loyal Republicans shouldn’t worry, as I doubt the Republican leadership intended to use this arrogant abuse of power against them.

[Speaking of corruption, it’s just a lame-ass internet poll, but I find it amusing that in my poll of “Who is more corrupt?”, “corrupt people” is currently coming in last, behind both Republicans and Democrats. I think that says something about how much the two sides trust each other.]

Of all the many strategic weaknesses that currently disadvantage the Democratic Party, perhaps the greatest is the fact that it is so… democratic. I don’t know that party leaders actually value dissent from within, but they certainly seem incapable of squashing it.

Republicans on the other hand, have no such problem. And as the NY Times reveals, the current GOP leadership is taking party unity to a new extreme through rule changes in both the House and the Senate. First Tom DeLay maneuvered to make his position as majority leader ethics-proof, and now his counterpart in the Senate, Bill Frist, has passed rule changes designed to gag the few remaining Republican moderates. [Senator Frist Tightens the Screws]

The rule undercuts members’ independence by giving Dr. Frist the power to fill the first two vacancies on all committees. This hobbles seniority, which has been the traditional path to power. The leader now has a cudgel for shaping the “world’s greatest deliberative body” into a chorus line. Senator Olympia Snowe of Maine, chronic Republican maverick, got to the heart of the matter in skewering her leader’s accomplishment: “There is only one reason for that change, and it is to punish people.”

Washington State GOPolitburo chair Chris Vance has clearly displayed the same ham-handed penchant towards rigid party unity as his national counterparts (if not the same aptitude). So all you self-proclaimed “Dinocrats” get ready for some disappointment should Rossi win the re-recount. Even if Rossi were really as moderate as his soft-spoken ads made him out to be (he’s not), the GOP and its right-wing backers don’t tolerate marching to the beat of a different drummer. I expect a Rossi administration to cheerfully goose-step along.

I’m taking a break from the debate over recounts and re-recounts, to talk for a moment about something a little less on the minds of most voters… my eternal damnation.

In a piece reprinted today in the Seattle P-I (“It’s sure to get tougher for secular liberals“), NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes about a subject that I’ve touched upon a couple of times (here and here), the fact that millions of evangelical Christians believe that I am going to Hell… and soon.

Well, not just me, but all nonbelievers. Jews, Muslims, Catholics, atheists, (and I’m guessing, Democratic-voting evangelicals too)… in short, just about anybody who doesn’t believe what they believe.

And not only do they think we’re all going to Hell, but when I hear them talk or write about it, I often detect a bit self-righteous gloating.

What does this have to do with politics? Well, just a word of caution to my Republican friends about their political allies in the Christian right, who many analysts believe swung the presidential election: it’s not just us secular liberals who need to worry… they believe you are going to Hell, too!

That’s right, all you conservative bloggers over at Sound Politics, Christ is coming back to toss you howling and screeching into a pit of eternal fire. (Well… maybe not Marsha.)

See you in Hell.

Yesterday I asked readers to try to convince me why Gregoire shouldn’t pay for a manual recount. The fact that none of you succeeded isn’t surprising, but I was disappointed by the lack of honesty.

The GOP isn’t asking Gregoire to concede for the good of the state, or out of honor or decency. They’re asking her to concede because they want Rossi to be governor, and they know that with a 42 vote margin out of 2.8 million cast, a manual recount would be a crap shoot.

Which, of course, is why Gregoire should ask for a manual recount. She could actually win, legally, and fair and square.

Not enough of an argument? Try these:

A) Manual counts are more accurate than machine counts. That is why WA, like every other state (I’ve looked at), either mandates a manual recount when the vote falls within a very close margin, or allows the candidates to request one. Machines are used because they are faster and cheaper, not because they are more accurate. Random errors tend to be statistically distributed among the candidates, thus a 1-2% error rate is acceptable in most elections… but not when the margin is less than 0.000015%.

B) This is not a “best out of three” series. It is utter bullshit to argue that Rossi won the first two counts, and that Gregoire winning on a third count would not be legitimate. The accuracy of machine counts fall outside the margin of this election; the only thing the recount proved was that a manual count is necessary to accurately determine the winner.

C) It’s the law. This isn’t a game… this is about who will be the next governor, and it would be irresponsible of Gregoire not to avail herself of any measure the law allows to assure her victory. Rossi’s BIAW backers used the law to their advantage when they pumped hundreds of thousands of workers comp dollars into his partisan campaign, and you can be sure they explore every avenue of the law each time they want to pave a farm or drain a wetland. Gregoire has a responsibility to her supporters to use the law to protect their interests.

The Seattle P-I makes the argument that Gregoire should indeed seek a manual recount, but pay for it statewide, rather than in selected precincts: “Count ’em again, Sam.”

I don’t buy the P-I’s argument that there is some moral or ethical imperative that the D’s should pay for a statewide recount. But strategically, I say they should ask for a full statewide manual recount regardless. It wouldn’t be bad PR either.

After all, this is the only way we’ll ever know who actually won this election.