(And there are some forty more media clips from the past week in politics at HominidViews.)
Mmmmm… Roasted Geov
Just a reminder to join me tonight for a 5oth birthday roast of Geov Parrish, with all proceeds benefiting Eat the State!
I’ll be emceeing as Knute Berger (Crosscut), former school board president Brita Butler-Wall, Tim Harris (Real Change), Lansing Scott (ETS!), Maria Tomchick (KEXP) and Mike McCormick (KEXP) futilely attempt to out-duel me in terms of the cruelty we lovingly can heap on Geov.
The festivities take place at the University Baptist Church, 47th & 12th NE in Seattle’s University District, where there will be cake, desserts, the usual party frivolities, and of course, roasted Geov. Tickets are $15 or two for $25; all proceeds benefit. Doors open at 7PM.
Only in Washington New York
Ten days after the election the votes are still being tallied, but the outcome only grows murkier with every passing day, setting the stage for a constitutional crisis that could grind our nation’s capital to a halt. What looked like a comfortable margin on election night has been shrinking steadily ever since, and with over 7,000 ballots left to count, and more arriving everyday, the lead could still changes.
That’s the sort of nightmare scenario that Secretary of State Sam Reed and his surrogates argue could only happen here in Washington state with our allegedly “absurd” postmarked by election day ballot deadline, but in fact it’s exactly what is happening in New York state in the hotly contested election for NY-23, only sorta, and not really as dramatically as the headline writers imply.
Trailing by 5,335 votes on election night, with 93 percent of the ballots counted, right-wingnut Doug Hoffman conceded the race, prompting Democrat Bill Owens to be swiftly sworn in to the House, just in time to cast a crucial vote in favor of healthcare reform. But as ballots continued to be tallied and errors were uncovered during recanvassing, Owens lead has shrunk to little more than 3,000 votes, with as many as 10,000 ballots remaining, raising the specter that the wrong man has been sworn into Congress.
Of course, the chance of Hoffman making up a 3,000 vote gap with so few ballots remaining is just shy of nil, but that hasn’t stopped the media from playing up the drama of what admittedly would be a really juicy story… you know, in the unlikely event it turned out to be true. Nor would this be the first time House leadership rushed to swear in the alleged winner of a special election before the results had been officially certified; the Republicans set that precedent.
But I find the hyperbolic coverage of this story most interesting, not just because it once again illustrates the point that shit happens, regardless of your election deadlines, but because it also clearly demonstrates how Reed and his surrogates are just plain wrong on one of their most basic “facts.”
Yesterday on KUOW, Reed once again stated that “most states” require ballots be received by election day, an assertion that has been repeated in media reports, but which is simply not true. New York state, for example, requires that ballots be postmarked the day before election day, and received no later than seven days after. But ballots from overseas citizens and uniformed service members are accepted as late as 13 days following the election, meaning that valid ballots will continue to arrive in NY-23 as late as next Monday.
Yes, there have been a couple excruciatingly close and drawn out contests here in Washington, but as rare as they are, they’re far from unique to our state and our mail-in voting system. Democracy is messy. Deal with it.
Best of luck, Kirby
Longtime conservative talk show host Kirby Wilbur got canned by KVI yesterday, and as much as we disagreed on almost every issue, you might be surprised to learn that I’m sad to see him go.
Back when I first stumbled into activism, my talk radio skills were mostly honed on KVI, where I became a liberal mascot of sorts for John Carlson, Bryan Suits and particularly Kirby, who was happy to engage me on any number of issues, regardless of my lowly stature as a political crackpot/blogger, or even my lack of particular expertise. Kirby was always fair and friendly to me on the air, and generous and supportive off. It was Kirby who first suggested that I should get my own radio show, and he even went so far as to write me a letter of recommendation.
So despite the fact that he could be a right-wing wacko whose anti-government politics threatened our quality of life, I have a personal fondness for the man.
I also have a fondness for live, local programming, something Seattle listeners just lost another twenty hours a week of.
John has moved over to KOMO-1000, Bryan to bigger and better things at bigger and better KFI, and now with Kirby’s departure, KVI has been handed over entirely to syndication. I know the folks at Fisher know that ultra-local is the future of terrestrial radio if it wants to compete with satellite, podcasts and internet streaming, but for now at least, it looks like management has chosen the path of least resistance.
So best of luck Kirby, and rest assured that your cancelation is no reflection on you. 16 years behind the mic is something to be proud of, even if your bat-shit crazy politics is not.
Open thread
Gateway to the chasm
This is kind of an odd story, not sure what to make of it. Oregonian reporter Allan Brettman reports that eleven members of the Northwest Congressional delegation signed a Nov. 9 letter to the Obama administration requesting funds for land purchases and economic development in the Columbia River Gorge.
The letter was signed by Oregon Sens. Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley and Washington Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell. Oregon Congressmen Earl Blumenauer, David Wu, Kurt Schrader and Peter DeFazio joined in the request, as did Washington Congressmen Jay Inslee, Jim McDermott and Norm Dicks.
It was timed to coincide with the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the Columbia River Gorge National Scenic Area Act.
And Baird, a 3rd Congressional District Democrat, says in a written statement issued today that his name also should have been on the letter — but his staff didn’t tell him about it.
And I guess one can surmise that nobody else, including members of the delegation, told Baird about it either.
Did something happen over the weekend?
Bend over, insert stick
Even less surprising than the revelation that the Ivar’s undersea billboard was an elaborate hoax, is the revelation of how far the Seattle Times actually has that stick shoved up its collective ass:
Times Executive Editor David Boardman says that while he can appreciate the initiative behind the marketing ploy and had suspected it was a hoax, he was distressed that Dorpat, whose “Now & Then” column has appeared in the newspaper’s Pacific Northwest magazine since 1982, would lie to a Times reporter.
Dorpat’s continued freelance relationship with the paper is “under review,” Boardman says.
So let me get this right. The Ivar’s undersea billboard hoax that Paul Dorpat participated in, that’s a bad thing that perhaps warrants termination, while the Susan Hutchison “I’m not a Republican” hoax that the Times own editorial board participated in, that’s okay.
Uh-huh.
My bad
The morning after the election, I looked at the county-by-county vote and percent reporting, and confidently predicted…
R-71 passes by a comfortable 4 to 6 point margin.
After today’s tallies, R-71 now leads by a 6.04 percent margin. I stand corrected.
The facts behind the ballot deadline debate
As best as I can tell, there are two main arguments being offered in favor of changing the ballot deadline from the current postmarked by election day to the more restrictive received by election day: 1) candidates and voters deserve to know who won on election night; and 2) it is the only way to avoid fiascos like the drawn out 2004 gubernatorial count.
But the flaw in these arguments is that they both represent a solution in search of a problem, and a solution that regardless, just wouldn’t work.
The gist of both arguments is that ballot counting is too slow, and that the only way to speed this is up is to require that all ballots be received by election day. That way, theoretically, we could report somewhat complete unofficial results on election night, just like we used to do when voting was primarily conducted at the polls. But a quick glance at ballot statistics in both Washington and Oregon reveals just how faulty that logic is.
The following table shows the cumulative ballot receipt numbers for King County in the days just preceding and following the 2009 general election. The third column represents these ballots as a percentage of the total number cast, based on a projected turnout of 55%. The fourth column represents the cumulative number of ballots counted and reported as of the end of that day.
| Ballots Received |
Pct. Of |
Ballots Counted |
|
| Fri. 10/30 | 229,825 | 38.70% | |
| Mon. 11/2 | 289,950 | 48.82% | |
| Tue. 11/3 | 452,522 | 76.19% | 254,261 |
| Wed. 11/4 | 572,611 | 96.41% | 308,650 |
| Thu. 11/5 | 581,313 | 97.88% | 377,157 |
| Fri. 11/6 | 582,757 | 98.12% | 485,856 |
As can be seen, 452,522 ballots were received by election day, roughly 76% of the total number cast. Yet only 254,261 were counted by the end of the day… barely more than the total number of ballots in hand the Friday prior to the election.
The bulk of the remainder of the ballots cast arrived the next day, with 572,611 in hand at KCE, or over 96% of the total number cast. Yet only 308,650 of these were counted by the end of Wednesday.
There are several obvious lessons to learn from the data. The first is that KCE can’t keep pace with the ballots it is already receiving, thus any delay in reporting returns is due not to a lack of ballots, but rather a lack of capacity to process them. This is true in Oregon as well, which typically reports only 50% of total votes by the first ballot drop election night, not much better than King County, and generally somewhat worse than Washington state as a whole.
That said, even the 43% of total votes reported by KCE on election night was a large enough sample to accurately project the winner in all but a handful of the hundreds of contests countywide. Candidates and voters do know the winners on election night, at least in the vast majority of races.
Of course, as the 2004 gubernatorial contest reminds us, there are those exceptionally close races where the counting and recounting can drag on for weeks, but these are fleetingly rare, and regardless, would not be impacted at all by moving the ballot deadline. This November, over 96.4% of ballots were received by Wednesday, and 98.1% by Friday. Even if we were willing and able to dedicate the resources necessary to count the ballots as they come in, it would only accelerate initial reports by a day, maybe two at most.
The fact is, it typically only takes a day or two to send mail within the county, thus the bulk of late postmarked ballots will inevitably arrive within a day or two following the election, as the table above definitively shows. Most of the remainder of ballots that trickle in over the next week or two are those coming from voters overseas and/or in the uniformed services, and I’m guessing there is little or no political support for making it even harder for overseas military personnel to vote.
That’s why, even in states with more restrictive ballot deadlines, exceptions are usually made for overseas voters. For example, Pennsylvania, which requires elective absentee ballots be received by the Friday before the election, allows overseas civilian and military ballots to arrive as late as ten days after. And that’s a pretty typical deadline nationwide.
Yes, it would be nice to get near complete results on election night the way most other states do, and they way we used to get here in Washington state before mail-in ballots started to dominate our voting, but this is the nature of mail-in elections. It takes time and resources to sort, process and verify signatures just in preparation for counting, and so we’ll never approach the sort of election night returns the likes of Reed, Gov. Gregoire and the Seattle Times editorial board apparently want. They sure don’t do it Oregon, even with their received by deadline.
Personally, I’d rather we get the count right, than fast. And I’m not sure I’m willing spend the extra money necessary to do both, let alone disenfranchise tens of thousands of late voters in the process.
Radio Goldy (briefly)
Ross Reynolds will be talking with Secretary of State Sam Reed and Rep. Sam Hunt sometime between 12:20 and 12:40 PM today on KUOW’s The Conversation, about the ballot deadline debate, and since I’ve been covering it so obsessively they’re gonna give me a couple minutes to respond before going to the phones.
I’ll have updated data to share with readers and listeners at that time.
UPDATE:
Well, for whatever reason, they didn’t get to me, which is too bad because Sam Reed was wrong or misleading on several facts.
The fake news busts Fake News
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Sean Hannity Uses Glenn Beck’s Protest Footage | ||||
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||||
Fake News, magically making trees grow back their leaves in late Autumn. Supporting Fake News channel is an unnatural act in more ways than one. Their fraud knows no limits.
UPDATE Nov. 12 10:45 AM– Sean Hannity has admitted he was wrong and has apologized.
A history of veterans
I just finished listening to KUOW’s broadcast of a special Veteran’s Day edition of BackStory… one of my favorite public radio shows. The episode, “Coming Home: A History of War Veterans,” along with links to additional material is available from the BackStory website, or you can just listen to it below.
[audio:http://www.backstoryradio.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/11/Coming-Home-A-History-of-War-Veter.mp3]Misplaced election reform priorities
These things don’t happen in a vacuum, and so it is not surprising to see Gov. Chris Gregoire joining the chorus of establishment voices demanding that the ballot deadline be changed from postmarked on election day to received by election day.
Earlier in the day, Gregoire said that the days, and potentially weeks, of not knowing the outcome of an election is hard not only on the candidates, but on the people who voted for them.
“Those candidates deserve to know. The people deserve to know,” Gregoire said about the counting process.
But as admirable as her empathy for her fellow politicians might be, the governor has yet to say a word about the real scandal in last Tuesday’s election: the forty-some thousand King County voters who were disenfranchised due to our state’s wholly inadequate ballot design and review procedures.
With the bulk of the ballots counted, my earlier analysis holds up. More than 9 percent of King County ballots fail to record a vote on Initiative 1033, compared to only 3 percent in the rest of the state. Meanwhile, the equally high profile Referendum 71, featured at the top of the ballot (as opposed to hidden underneath the instructions), enjoys a remarkably low 1.6 percent residual vote rate in King County, right in line with voters throughout the rest of the state.
And this otherwise inexplicable falloff in voting on I-1033 occurred despite the fact that the No campaign spent millions of dollars on TV ads that explicitly instructed voters on where to find the question on the King County ballot.
Gov. Gregoire and Secretary of State Sam Reed may not have noticed the scandal, but the Voting Technology Project at the Brennan Center for Justice has, citing the I-1033 vote as “more evidence, if any was needed, of the potential disenfranchising effects of poor design.”
But the Brennan Center goes further, actually recommending a very simple, reasonable and inexpensive reform:
What probably would have alerted officials to this problem ahead of time, and at little or no cost, would have been a simple usability test: observing ten or fifteen King County citizens as they “voted” on the ballot before the design was finalized. This solution is simple, easy and cheap. The Usability Professionals Association has a great explanation of how it’s done.
If county officials watched a dozen people fill out the ballot, at least a couple might have accidentally skipped the ballot initiative. And, with that, officials would have been alerted to the fact that their ballot contained a serious flaw.
The ballot eventually got it’s usability test, of course…but on Election Day. And approximately 40,000 voters showed — a little too late — that this particular ballot design failed.
Secretary of State Sam Reed has been pushing the ballot deadline issue hard behind the scenes, attempting to capitalize on what has been wrongly portrayed as a slow, long slog to determine the winner in the Seattle mayoral race. But while both he and Gov. Gregoire argue to fix a problem that is not a problem, with a solution that will not speed up election night reporting at all, they both ignore an obvious flaw in our elections system, that just disenfranchised tens of thousands of voters, and that can be easily fixed via a small, inexpensive procedural reform.
I don’t expect the Governor or the Secretary of State to agree with me on every issue. But I do expect them to have their priorities in order when it comes to something as basic to democracy as the integrity of our electoral process.
Pulling Back the Curtain on Rob McKenna’s War on the Sick
In the wake of the Obama Administration’s declaration that the federal government would respect state medical marijuana laws, Kirk Johnson in the New York Times reported the following:
For years, since the first medical marijuana laws were passed in the mid-1990s, many local and state governments could be confident, if not complacent, knowing that marijuana would be kept in check because it remained illegal under federal law, and that hard-nosed federal prosecutors were not about to forget it.
But with the Justice Department’s announcement last week that it would not prosecute people who use marijuana for medical purposes in states where it is legal, local and state officials say they will now have to take on the job themselves.
Why? If it’s legal, then what job is there to take on? The article appears to be implying that it’s the job of state and local officials to enforce the federal law over the state one. That’s just not true. Here in Washington, our state law enforcement officials should be following the voter initiative passed in 1998 (and the follow-up legislation from 2007), not the Federal law. Unfortunately, our Attorney General doesn’t seem to agree. Rob McKenna’s office has been trying to undermine Washington State’s medical marijuana law, and thanks to a Public Disclosure Request, we’re finally able to shine some light on what they’ve been doing.
After the PDR was filed, nearly 800 pages of emails and other documents from the Department of Corrections were recently released to the Cannabis Defense Coalition. They’re broken up into eight 100-page PDF files. The documents are not in any order, so I created a chronological index for easy searching of specific events.
The reason that so much attention is focused on the DOC is because a number of qualified medical marijuana patients have been raided by police and arrested (the medical marijuana law does not provide an affirmative defense from arrest), pressured into accepting plea deals that would keep them out of a jail cell but still on probation, and then put under the supervision of the Department of Corrections. The Department of Corrections would then claim the authority to deny those individuals the ability to use medical marijuana through internal rules that they’d made up after consulting with the AG’s office. They would then easily enforce those rules by administering drug tests. In the end, you had individuals who’d been authorized by their doctors to use medical marijuana having law enforcement interfere with that decision and either force them to stop using that medicine or to use a less effective alternative like Marinol.
This end-around of the voter-approved medical marijuana law worked on a number of medical marijuana patients. Pamela Olson was one victim before her husband Bruce fought his own case in Kitsap County court and won (sadly, they lost their home in the process). It’s not clear, even with the released documents, exactly how many people were affected by this (names are redacted throughout), but lawyers who defend authorized patients have been dealing with cases across the state for several years now and are still hoping to bring some kind of legal action against the Attorney General, the DOC, or both.
What we do know from the documents just released is that there was clearly some nervousness within the DOC about how the Attorney General’s office was advising them to deal with those under their supervision who were authorized by a doctor to use medical marijuana. The actual advice from the AG’s office is also redacted throughout the documents (using the same attorney-client privilege argument that the Bush Administration used to initially keep the infamous torture memos under wraps), but emails like this one from a DOC employee make it clear that the Attorney General was advising them to do things that were morally questionable at best and against state law at worst [emphasis in original]:
Karen, Lori, Eldon let me offer a few off the top of my head thoughts and comments. How DOC handles the medicinal use of MJ depends on whether this is the hill we want to die on? The advice from the AGO may* (see below) be correct, as far as it goes, i.e. [<—————-redacted—————–>] But the real question is not whether DOC can violate an offender who proves the prerequisites for the medicinal use of MJ, but can/should DOC recognize it as a defense? From a small “p” political standpoint does DOC want to violate an offender for activity that the state legislature recognizes as lawful? Something they made lawful in recognition of the medical necessities occasioned by the offender’s illness.
Consider if you will the purpose and intent of the enabling statue: “The people of Washington state find that some patients with terminal or debilitating illnesses, under their physician’s care, may benefit from the medical use of marijuana. Some of the illnesses for which marijuana appears to be beneficial include chemotherapy related nausea and vomiting in cancer patients; AIDS wasting syndrome; severe muscle spasms associated with multiple sclerosis and other spasticity disorders; epilepsy; acute or chronic glaucoma; and some forms of intractable pain. The people find that humanitarian compassion necessitates that the decision to authorize the medical use of marijuana by patients with terminal or debilitating illnesses is a personal, individual decision, based upon their physician’s professional medical judgment and discretion.” So how would this look? Offender XY is HIV positive and has full blown AIDS.
They are in considerable pain and a licensed doctor has agreed that MJ will relieve this offenders suffering. If all of the statutory requirements are met, this person’s possession and use is not against state law. Should DOC still violate this offender for actions that our state legislature recognized was necessary for, “humanitarian compassion”. Do we really want to die on this hill?
That memo was from April 2008. A month later, as a number of the indexed items show, the DOC was forced to apologize to a medical marijuana patient who was improperly arrested and held for six days until her blood pressure shot up to dangerous levels. At around the same time, the DOC finally formalized their policy on dealing with medical marijuana, which was little more than a smokescreen that made it appear as if they were accommodating the law, but in reality was simply denying everyone who had their doctor fill out the DOC’s verification form. On several occasions, they were informed that they were violating state law, but those warnings don’t appear to have made any difference in their policy.
The larger question for the attorneys, doctors, and patients who’ve been fighting the DOC over this policy continues to be focused on what Attorney General Rob McKenna’s office was doing and why. All of the deliberations and discussions at the beginning of this timeline happened during the Bush Administration, when it was still the Federal Government’s policy to expend resources to override state medical marijuana law (which the Obama Administration just reversed). But Rob McKenna doesn’t work for the Federal Government. He’s our state’s top law enforcement officer. There’s no reason for him to be trying to enforce Federal laws over our state laws, especially a state law that was passed by a wide margin in a voter initiative and maintains widespread support. It’s clear from reading through these documents that the AG’s office was giving advice that led to a policy that undermined the law, but until there are enough resources to take them to court over their claims of attorney-client privilege, their communications to the DOC will stay hidden.
For anyone who hasn’t followed the fight over medical marijuana in states where it’s been legalized, Kirk Johnson’s description of the attitude of local law enforcers may seem surreal. At a time when we have prisons that are bursting at the seams and budgets that are running low, you’d think that people who collect a salary on the taxpayer dime would have more sense than to remain so concerned about stopping people with serious ailments from using a medicinal plant. Throw in the fact that the voters of this state have demanded that this be legal, and it’s beyond comprehension that police are still actively trying to stop people from using it. Whatever the rationale is for Rob McKenna to continue to undermine the state’s medical marijuana law, the least we should be able to get from him is more transparency into what his office has been doing.
***************************************
The Cannabis Defense Coalition, who put in the PDR request, is expecting to get two more document dumps from the DOC. The requests are not free, so if you feel inclined to pitch in, they have a Paypal donation page here.
UPDATE: A Public Disclosure Request was filed, not a FOIA. The post has been updated.
Interesting Baird-Seattle factoid
Well, okay, this is not a secret if you follow Washington politics, but it’s worth bringing up right now.
According to Open Secrets, Rep. Brian Baird’s (D-WA-03) top three metro areas for donations last cycle, excluding PAC contributions, are Portland-Vancouver, Seattle-Bellevue-Everett and Washington, D.C.
And it sounds like the heat is ratcheting up. From Politico:
A delegation from Vancouver’s Clark County Democratic Central Committee on Monday requested a meeting with Baird in the district to encourage him to vote yes on the final version of the Health Care Reform bill.
Chris Bassett, a Vancouver-based Democratic activist who writes a blog about Clark County politics, said the congressman had damaged his standing within the party.
“Brian’s really moving the wrong way,” he said. “A lot of Democrats are going to sit on their hands in 2010.”
“This, for a lot of folks like myself frankly, is the last straw,” Bassett said.
I’ve been tempted to write that the lesson I took away from the Guns of August was that being over-the-top rude and crazy is the best way to get Baird’s attention, but as we all know, liberals are expected to be civil at all times. Don’t want anyone hitting the fainting couch. Jolly good, tea and crumpets, gov’nor.
So I politely and respectfully hope that individual donors to Baird, many of whom live in the Puget Sound region, will consider politely encouraging him to vote for the final bill, assuming the Stupak-sepsis amendment is removed. Did I mention be polite?
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