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Mike McGinn padded his margin by an additional 694 votes this afternoon, more than doubling his narrow lead over Joe Mallahan to 1209 votes:

Mike McGinn	75,657	49.99%
Joe Mallahan	74,448	49.19%

This represents McGinn’s largest numerical lead thus far, and while not conclusive, bodes well for those anticipating a trend toward McGinn amongst late voters.

In this latest drop, King County Elections added 21,691 Seattle ballots to the total, of which McGinn won 51.7% of the vote… his best performance in any of the batches thus far. KCE will drop a smaller batch of ballots later tonight, and that will give us a better idea of whether a McGinn trend is revealing itself.

Regardless, these new numbers don’t look good for Mallahan. McGinn’s margin of victory is now outside the 0.5% range that would trigger an automatic recount, and as the number of ballots outstanding diminishes, so do the odds of a Mallahan comeback. If the turnout projections hold true, Mallahan would have to win about 51.2% of the remaining ballots. This is certainly doable — Mallahan won 51.1% of the Wednesday afternoon drop, his best showing thus far — I just don’t know of any solid reason to suggest a late Mallahan surge.

UPDATE:
And in the county executive race, Dow Constantine continues to expand his lead over Susan Hutchison, who now trails by a nearly 17-point margin. That’s worse than David Irons.

Washington’s best political satire site is without a doubt, Red County, a pitch-perfect, Colbert-esque parody of the angry, deluded, self-denial that tends to fill the right-wing blogs. And it doesn’t get any better than their frenetic mock analysis of the King County Executive race:

The general election result that shattered any hope of Republican resurgence in the state was the King County Executive’s race. Councilman Dow Constantine smashed blue dog, moderate Democrat Susan Hutchinson in that election contest. Republicans in King County now go down in defeat again in their attempt to elect someone other than radical, leftwing, crackpots like Constantine. Many are questioning why the King County Republican Party backed Susan and not a principled conservative in the first place!

Susan Hutchison is a “blue dog, moderate Democrat” who lost because she wasn’t conservative enough? Absolutely brilliant! And delivered with such unwavering deadpan and stereotypically stilted cadence, you can almost hear the (u)SP crowd angrily cheering along.

Funny stuff.

I feel snubbed…

Locally, an iron triangle of left interest groups (e.g. NARAL) liberal media (The Stranger, PubliCola) and the labor left (SEIU) seek to impose ideological requirements while slamming any Democrat who hints at moderation.

What am I… chopped liver?

Other than that, I kinda agree with Joel.

So, how crazy is Susan Hutchison’s letter to supporters, hinting that a U.S. Senate run might lay in her future? Not so crazy that I hadn’t predicted exactly that just a couple weeks back.

Ken Camp at NPI Advocate notices that Rep. Adam Smith (WA-09) and Rep. Brian Baird (WA-03) need to get some phone calls of encouragement regarding the pending health care bill. There might be a vote this weekend.

Feel free to click through to NPI Advocate for more information.

Separately, a reliable source tells me calls are being forwarded to Congressional offices by some group or other that is deliberately targeting seniors and trying to scare them, so why not take a few moments if you live in either district and make your own legitimate call to your elected representative? You’ll feel good about it all day, and then you will smile at other people.

A lot of folks deserve credit for the defeat passage of Referendum 71, but when it comes to the underlying strategy that got us this far, it’s hard to argue that anybody has played a bigger role than state Sen. Ed Murray.

Murray says the state’s organizing networks now are stronger as a result of the R-71 campaign. “The vote affirms that the strategy we tried in Washington state was the right one,” he says, referring to passing three incremental domestic partnership bills, each one granting more marriage rights to same-sex couples. “We engage citizens in conversions about what it means, survivor benefits and funeral arrangements, instead of just focusing on one word.”

And it wasn’t just this vote in Washington that proved the strategy right, but the failed vote in Maine that would have approved full blown same-sex marriage there. Maine voters just weren’t quite ready to approve gay marriage, and most likely voters aren’t quite ready to do the same here. But by acting incrementally and forcing a public conversation about marriage equality, our voters have been willing to go further toward marriage equality than voters in any other state.

In fact, ironically, by forcing the issue onto the ballot, the opponents of R-71 have likely advanced the cause of marriage equality in Washington state by accelerating the conversation, and by reassuring legislators that they have the support of the people. In a few years, after more voters have grown comfortable with the new status quo, Washington will be ready to take that last step.

It took a couple decades for Washington to finally pass legislation extending our state’s anti-discrimination laws to gays and lesbians, but only a few more years to achieve “everything but marriage.” And Murray deserves a hearty congratulations for a legislative strategy well executed.

Yeah, I know, there’s a tea party at the Capitol, and a tragic mass shooting at Fort Hood, but still, you’d think the House healthcare reform bill being endorsed by the AMA of all organizations, not to mention the AARP, would be much bigger news.

Whoooo, pretty radical groups there. The Blue Dogs better be careful deciding whether or not they want to join forces with such questionable allies on an idea as unpopular as healthcare reform. Seriously, check out all the fringe groups supporting the bill. Seriously, those wacky pediatricians on on there, and the American Medical Colleges, hotbeds of radical politics that they are. And you know that the Colleges of Physicians and Surgeons are communist cells. Don’t even get me started on the Consumers Union or Easter Seals.

I mean, this is the AMA for chrisakes, the organization, historically, that is probably as responsible as any other for killing past healthcare reform efforts. You know, those same doctors who are being asked to deal with all those goddamn government bureaucrats.

But, well, Republicans won gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey, so I guess healthcare reform is dead.

I know the timing is a bit insensitive, and it will probably piss off some folks for me to go there right now, but dwelling on the tragic mass shooting today at Fort Hood, in which 12 have been killed and 31 injured, I couldn’t help but think about the debate that raged in the comment threads here and elsewhere after the Virginia Tech shootings.

There was an argument at the time, strongly made by gun rights advocates, that the death toll at Virginia Tech could have been dramatically lessened, or even averted, had faculty and students been likewise armed. Virginia Tech, like many schools, was a gun-free zone, and that, gun control critics argued, made the shooter’s defenseless victims less safe.

Fort Hood, on the other hand, is most definitely not a gun free zone. In fact, I’m pretty sure that military bases are filled with men and women who carry arms, and are highly trained in the skills to use them.

And yet… 12 dead, 31 injured before the shooter was finally taken down.

I’m not saying that the Fort Hood and Virginia Tech tragedies make an argument one way or another for gun free zones. Rather, I’m saying the exact opposite.

King County Elections just released their latest results, and of the 27,151 Seattle ballots counted today, Mike McGinn expanded his narrow lead over Joe Mallahan by 54 votes, taking a 515 vote advantage in the mayor’s race, 65,172 to 64,657.

Countywide, KCE dropped a total of 68,507 new ballots today, with Seattle ballots comprising a somewhat disproportionate share. In fact, thus far, Seattle is reporting 36.52% turnout compared to only 34.93% for the county as a whole. As a result, it should be no surprise that Susan Hutchison’s numbers continue to fall, with her now trailing Dow Constantine 58.12% to 41.67%. That’s a better than 16 point margin… you know… David Irons numbers.

Meanwhile, in the one statewide contest with any drama left, R-71 continues to expand its lead, even while King still trails the rest of the state in reported turnout. R-71 is now passing by 61,394 votes, or a 4.7% margin. Looks like my earlier predictions were right on the money.

So what does all this mean in terms of trends? Not all that much yet.

With today’s drop, KCE should have finally worked its way through the ballots it had already received and sorted as of 5PM Friday, and while ballots are not necessarily tallied in any sort of chronological order, we can be somewhat certain that the remaining ballots consist mostly of those that were mailed during the final days of the campaign. So if there is a trend, liberal or conservative, for McGinn or for Mallahan, it should start making itself known tomorrow.

That said, I’m guessing the McGinn camp is breathing a little easier this evening than they were after yesterday’s returns.

UPDATE:
The Seattle Times just reported what the rest of us already knew on election night: “Voters approve Referendum 71“. So I guess it’s official, what with them being the paper of record and all. Time for teh gays to celebrate.

Washington State Republican Party chair Luke Esser explaining Susan Hutchison’s lopsided loss in the King County executive race…

“King County is a tough place to do business if you’re not a left-wing Democrat,” Esser said. “Inside the city of Seattle I could probably bring Abraham Lincoln back from the dead and he wouldn’t win…you’ve got to have a ‘D’ next to your name.”

Though the county executive’s position is now officially non-partisan, Republicans thought they had their best shot at the office in more than a decade with former television broadcaster Susan Hutchsion in the race. Hutchison ran as an independent but has ties to GOP candidates and causes.

Hear that? The state Republican Party chair admits that Republican Susan Hutchison lost because voters figured out she was, of course, a Republican.

Like I said… the most dishonest campaign ever.

And as for Esser’s crack about Lincoln, that brings us to our poll of the day:

Much has been made of the placement of  Tim Eyman’s Initiative 1033 on the King County ballot, somewhat hidden below the instructions on the left-hand side of the page, visually separated from the rest of the ballot questions. I-1033 opponents had raised alarms that this poorly designed ballot layout might depress the vote on the measure in our state’s most populous and anti-1033 county, causing many voters to miss the question entirely. And now that a large chunk of the results are in, it is clear that their fears were well founded.

Indeed, I-1033’s placement on the King County ballot is destined to become a classic case study in how ballot design can dramatically influence election outcomes… right up there alongside Palm Beach County’s infamous butterfly ballot.

In Washington’s 38 other counties, about 2.8% of ballots have thus far failed to register a vote on I-1033, a pretty typical “residual vote rate” for a high profile, statewide initiative. But in King County, a full 9.8% of ballots have thus far failed to record a vote for I-1033, a very statistically significant falloff from the statewide average, and entirely out of whack with the county’s historical performance on other such ballot measures.

The “residual vote rate” measures the total number of ballots for which no vote is recorded in a particular contest due to uncounted, unmarked or overvoted ballots, and as such it is often used to measure the effect of different voting technologies and interface designs on the incidence of lost votes. Of course some portion of the residual vote rate is due to voters choosing not to cast a vote in a particular race, a factor that can be fairly pronounced in low profile, down-ticket races. But voter choice simply cannot explain the extraordinary King County discrepancy.

A quick glance at this and other elections reveals that I-1033’s residual vote rate in King County is not only unprecedentedly high for a top-of-the-ticket measure, its huge variance from the statewide average is absolutely unheard of. For example, the equally high profile Referendum 71, appearing on the same ballot as I-1033, registered a 1.7% residual vote rate in King County, closely matching  the 1.8% rate for the state as a whole. Likewise, 2007’s I-960 — also a government limiting Eyman initiative, that also ran in an off-year election — recorded a 2.9% residual vote rate in King County, right in line with the 3.1% rate statewide.

Historically, residual vote rates for high profile statewide ballot measures simply do not rise much above a few percent, and they certainly don’t vary by more than a couple percentage points from county to county.

Until now.

So what’s to explain the fact that nearly one out of every ten King County ballots fail to register a vote for or against I-1033, a rate nearly two and a half times the statewide average? With 38 of our 39 counties now voting exclusively by mail, and most or all using the same mark sense technology, there can be only one explanation: poor ballot design… a visually confusing layout that inadvertently disenfranchised 7% of King County voters.

To put that in perspective, based on turnout projections, about 42,000 King County voters will have failed to vote on I-1033 simply because they didn’t find the question on the ballot, and with voters here overwhelmingly rejecting the measure 67% to 33%, this ballot-induced residual vote will end up costing the No side about 14,000 votes from their final statewide margin. Had this been a closer race, ballot design very well could have determined the outcome.

Ever since the disputed 2004 gubernatorial election, Republicans have howled in outrage over the bare handful of cases of known ballot fraud, demanding ever more restrictive and onerous procedures on both registration and voting. But as I have argued from the start, the real and present threat to our electoral process comes not from ballot and tabulation fraud — the evidence of which in Washington state is fleeting or nil — but from voter intimidation and suppression, intentional or not.

However pedestrian or accidental the cause, 42,000 King County voters were just disenfranchised, and yet we’ve heard nary a peep from the usual election reform suspects. Makes one wonder how much they really cherish our right to vote?

The “free-market” means that a massive American corporation, propped up and majority owned by US taxpayers, can now do whatever the hell it wants.

Thousands of the 25,000 workers from Opel’s four factories are gathered in Ruesselsheim to protest at GM’s refusal to sell its European operations.

GM’s U-turn came just days before the agreed sale of a majority stake in Opel and Vauxhall to car parts maker Magna and Russian bank Sberbank.

Under that agreement, Opel workers were promised no factories would be closed.

Sure, this is “good news” for workers in the United Kingdom, just as workers in South Carolina had some pleasant news recently, when Boeing announced it would move a 787 production line to the non-union state. We’ll see how it works out in the long run.

What’s not good news is that nothing changed in terms of fixing the fundamentally unsound financial sector, because it’s still out there operating as if nothing had happened. Workers are being screwed! Wall Street approves! The mammoth banks are screwing consumers and creating “innovative” financial products! Yeah! This is the system that led us to the brink of worldwide financial calamity, and the very same people are back at it again, because they’re still in charge. The real power doesn’t lie in the White House anyhow, I think we all know that.

Decisions like the ones made by Boeing and GM are rational in terms of the zombie neo-liberal system, which rewards chasing the lowest common denominator, but in the process many regular people are stripped not only of autonomy, but in many cases the ability to earn a living. Not every western democracy has abandoned the basic rights of workers, either in law or culturally, and neither has every western democracy been subjected to the idiocy of Fox Noise and the associated conservative movement hate speech on a daily basis. It’s possible that one or more of these western countries may decide to fight back.

It will be interesting to see how German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who has been played for an asbolute fool, reacts as the days go by. Sure, there will be strikes and such, but the biggest threat to the zombie economic order might be the regular people who don’t believe in it that much any more.

There have already been spontaneous rumblings such as the “credit card revolt.” Why risk getting bashed and gassed when there’s YouTube? BTW, there’s a plan afoot that would care of the troublesome tubes under the guise of “copyright reform,” but I digress.

But what if they threw an economy and nobody bought stuff? Seems to me we’re already half way or more to that point, with consumers de-leveraging in a nearly unprecedented fashion.

There’ve been two news items this week that have shown us one of the uglier aspects of the drug war – attempts to censor science and expert opinion in order to maintain the status quo.

In the UK, a chief drugs advisor named David Nutt was fired by Home Secretary Alan Johnson after Nutt publicly stated something that’s rather obvious: marijuana and ecstasy are safer drugs than alcohol. Nutt was a member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs (ACMD), and two other members of the council quit after the firing.

Here in the US, Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa is going even farther than that. In response to a bill introduced by Senator Jim Webb of Virginia to establish a blue-ribbon commission to study how to fix our criminal justice system, Grassley tacked on an amendment that would prohibit the commission members from considering drug decriminalization as an option. This is like having a commission to study how to deal with global warming but not allowing the commission to suggest reducing carbon emissions.

Is there any other political subject where we so willingly accept the idea that science and reason are a threat that we have to legislate against? When Nutt made his proclamation, he was able to point to a recent study in The Lancet on the relative harms of various substances. As is mostly common knowledge now, you can’t overdose from marijuana and it’s less addictive than nearly all other recreational drugs. Ecstasy is also non-addictive and kills far, far fewer people than alcohol does every year, while also having potential medical uses. But simply pointing this out is apparently grounds for termination within the British Government.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who has previously ignored the advice of the ACMD when his government stiffened penalties on marijuana, had this to say in defense of the move:

On climate change, or health, for example, we take the best scientific advise possible, but in an area like drugs we have to look at it in the round. We have got to look not just at what medics and scientists are saying to us – and we take that very seriously – but also what impact differ­ent decisions can have on young, vul­nerable people.

For some reason, this passes as an acceptable excuse. Drug policy is somehow a grand exception to the general rule that if you employ science and make rational decisions, you’ll end up with better outcomes. Brown seems convinced that if adults don’t act like paranoid simpletons, their kids will all become drug addicts. This is moronic. Of course, any time a drug warrior is backed into a corner of their own irrationality, they always end up claiming that what they’re doing will be better off for children – and never with any evidence to back them up. The UK continues to have much higher drug use rates among teens than nearly every other country in Europe, despite having some of the strictest drug laws too.

Back here in the United States, a reporter asked Senator Grassley about his amendment. Here was his response:

Well, my intent on that amendment isn’t any different than any other amendments that are coming up. The Congress is setting up a commission to study certain things. And the commission is a — is an arm of Congress, because Congress doesn’t have time to review some of these laws.

And — and — and the point is, for them to do what we tell them to do. And one of the things that I was anticipating telling them not to do is to — to recommend or study the legalization of drugs.

So Grassley is proudly admitting – out loud, to a reporter – that he thinks it’s a good idea to set up a commission to study a complex issue, but then also tell the commission what they can and can’t recommend. That’s surreal. It’s not like he and the rest of the dinosaurs in the Senate can’t do what they do in the UK and just ignore the experts and then fire them when they speak louder. Grassley posted this amendment because he’s too scared to even hear people suggest it. God forbid drug policy experts suggest that Iowa shouldn’t continue to arrest startlingly high percentages of its relatively few black residents for drug crimes. In the end, the reluctance to confront the broken status quo of our criminal justice system is not so much about the worry of children grappling with an adult issue so much as it is the worry that adults will have to stop dealing with this issue like children.