HorsesAss.Org

(There are more than thirty links to media from the past week in politics posted at Hominid Views.)

King County Councilman Reagan Dunn is running for Washington State Attorney General in 2012 (unless, possibly, redistricting or Reichert’s retirement leaves an open seat in WA-08). So what kind of bold leadership can we expect from Dunn? Not much.

The Seattle Times editorial board on the message to be taken from the failure of I-1098:

MORE taxes: not wanted in Washington. If there is any common message in the initial numbers for ballot propositions in Washington, it is that. … The message is unmistakable, and candidates cannot say they did not hear it.

The Seattle Times editorial board on the message to be taken from the failure of I-1082:

BY rejecting Initiative 1082, voters said they want the sale of workers’ compensation insurance to remain in the hands of the state. The Legislature is still free to reform the program, and it should do so.

Um… so… when voters reject tax hikes, it means all tax hikes should be completely off the table, but when voters reject workers’ compensation reform, it means the Legislature should get to work reforming workers’ compensation, except, you know, in a different way. Did I get that straight?

Gosh, how could we possibly augur the will of the people without the haruspices a the Times to pick apart the entrails of the body politic for us?

An absolutely perfect lampooning of the rhetorical approach of the right on just about everything.

As depressed as I am over the turn of events in LD-25, where neo-fascist wunderkind Hans Zeiger has retaken the lead over incumbent Democratic State Rep. Dawn Morrell, I have newfound hope in LD-41, where just a few days ago incumbent State Sen. Randy Gordon appeared to be hopelessly trailing faux-moderate Republican challenger Steve Litzow.

In fact, if the trends from the last few days of returns hold up, my calculations suggest that Gordon, now trailing by 336 votes, is currently on pace to take a small lead.

Gordon, who was appointed to replace former Sen. Fred Jarrett after he stepped down to take the number two position in King County, is widely regarded as one of the most liberal members of the Senate. So holding this seat in the former Eastside GOP stronghold would be a huge victory.

Last night, incoming House Majority Leader Rep. Eric Cantor (R-Va.), soon to be the highest ranking Jewish member of Congress in US history, held an unusual one-on-one meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, after which Cantor’s office issued a statement that included the following:

“Eric stressed that the new Republican majority will serve as a check on the Administration and what has been, up until this point, one party rule in Washington,” the readout continued. “He made clear that the Republican majority understands the special relationship between Israel and the United States, and that the security of each nation is reliant upon the other.”

Um… a bit of advice to Rep. Cantor from a fellow member of the tribe: if you really care about Israel and its security, and the welfare of world Jewry in general, then the last thing you want to do is turn American support for Israel into a partisan issue. The state of Israel could not have survived without broad and consistent support from both Republicans and Democrats alike, so when Americans start taking sides on Israel as bitterly and divisively as your party has pushed them to take sides on nearly every other issue… well, nothing good can come from that, for Jews anywhere.

If you’re searching for evidence of Right-Wing Derangement Syndrome, and the corrosive effect it is having on our body politic, look no further than Washington’s 1st Legislative District, where certified teahadist Heidi Munson and her supporters have run a mean-spirited and racist campaign against Democratic Representative-Elect Luis Moscoso.

One Moscoso supporter reports being harassed by a Munson doorbeller, who ironically called Moscoso a “racist” while accusingly him of being part of a La Raza invasion of Snohomish County. Another supporter reports a confrontation with a Munson sign waver, who insisted Moscoso wasn’t a citizen, and demanded to see his birth certificate. And just this Sunday Moscoso found a cross made out of his campaign signs on his office lawn.

That sort of xenophobic race baiting doesn’t occur in a vacuum; it’s the result of a top down rhetorical strategy that seeks to exploit fear, anger, paranoia and hatred, all for cheap political gain. And it’s a strategy one can’t simply turn off after the election.

Throughout the campaign Munson supporters have left numerous ugly comments on Moscoso’s Facebook page about him, his family and President Obama. And just yesterday, after the latest ballot drops gave Moscoso an 863-vote lead in a race he was trailing on election night, another Munson troll left this oh-so-bitter/cliche comment:

That final line, “You will not have that seat,” sure does sound like a threat, and I hope the Washington State Patrol investigates it, but the larger point is that when such an angry (and presumably armed) segment of the population has become so convinced by its leaders that the only way for a Democrat to win is to cheat, lie and steal, well… would it really be so surprising to see that result in violent consequences?

If Munson cared about democracy and the rule of law, she would concede now. She would congratulate Moscoso on his victory, and wish him the best of luck. This was a heartbreakingly close loss, she would tell her supporters, by she would vouch for the legitimacy of the outcome while thanking her supporters for all the hard work they put into her campaign. Yes, if Munson truly cared about democracy and the rule of law, she would be gracious in defeat, leading her supporters by example.

But she won’t, because like so many others on the teahadist right, Munson and her cross-planting followers are little more than modern day Klanners, intent on appealing to our nation’s basest instincts in their delusional struggle against the La Rasa hordes. And what’s truly scary, is that she almost won.

By happy coincidence, the new Speaker of the House and much of the Republican leadership of the House represent districts in swing states. And while their districts likely will remain safe after redistricting, I hope the Democrats spend the time recruiting candidates and spend the money running ads against Republican leadership.

This accomplishes a few things: first it pushes them to moderate their stances. If they know there will be a serious challenge from people to their left, they’ll have to think before kowtowing to the teaparty activists in their midst. So perhaps we’ll see awful legislation turned slightly less awful if the people charged with passing it through the House fear for their own seats.

It also means we can play offense in states that Obama is going to need to carry. Every crazy bill passed through the House gets a nice ad in Ohio and Virginia calling it out, and lays blame on Boehner and Cantor. We get to have a conversation about the awful things the republicans do in areas of those states that perhaps don’t often have those conversations. This will help Obama win in Ohio by having a conversation, by getting media for the Democrat’s position, and if the downticket races look competitive recruit volunteers.

Best (although least likely) of all, we might pick up some seats. Yes, Boehner got 2/3 of the vote last year. But every district in the country gets redistricted, so last cycle’s results are only so telling. And Democrats haven’t given these districts a test in a long time, so it’s not as out there as you might think.

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.