HorsesAss.Org

I’m working on a longer piece explaining the whole ballot counting process (and why switching the ballot deadline to received by election day won’t much speed things up), but if you’re wondering why King County could tally 71,915 ballots on Monday, but only 18,236 today of the approximately 80,000 ballots it had on hand, well, that gets to the heart of one of the factors most responsible for slowing down the count: a lot of voters just can’t seem to follow instructions.

According to King County Elections Chief Communications Officer Kim van Ekstrom, over 17 percent of the ballots received this cycle needed to be “duplicated” so that they could be properly read by the optical scanners. Sometimes it’s due to a damaged ballot or stray marks, but often it’s due to voters not properly filling in the circles,  or using the wrong color pen. Voters are clearly instructed to use a black or dark blue pen (the scanners are specifically designed not to read red or green), but King County voters apparently own a rainbow of writing utensils.

Over 17 percent! That’s well more than 100,000 duplicated ballots in King County alone.

So the reason why the remaining ballots are taking so long to count is that these are the ballots that took a detour through the process, either due to a missing or mismatched signature, or the need to duplicate the ballot before scanning. And, well, that just takes time.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5yNZ1U37sE&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

That’s Rep. John Shimkus (R-IL) at a House Energy and Environment subcommittee hearing, making the case that we shouldn’t worry about climate change, because God promised Noah that he’d never destroy the world again. Which I guess is an expression of faith of which we should all be tolerant… if not for the fact that Rep. Shimkus is in line to be the next chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Hey, thanks America, for putting the House in the hands of the best and the brightest!

The election has come and gone and most of the smoke has cleared. So please join us tonight for an evening of post-election debriefings and celebrations under the influence. We meet at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at about 8:00 pm. Some of us will be there much earlier to watch discuss election returns ballot counts over dinner.

Not in Seattle? There is a good chance you live near one of the 250 other chapters of Drinking Liberally.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Uh-huh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s what my people call being a mensch.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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