HorsesAss.Org

Whenever I hear a Republican official or groupie talking about “restoring faith” in King County Elections, I have to laugh, for the state GOP has done everything in its power to destroy that public faith. Of course they couldn’t do it alone, and most of the damage has come at the hands of our mainstream media through its institutional fetish for reporting scandal over all else.

How many times over the past year were we treated to front page headlines screaming about “felon voters” or the vastly misunderstood and overstated, so-called ballot “discrepancy”…? See, that’s a juicy story that gets Dean Logan stuttering, Chris Vance foaming at the mouth, and readers riled up in outrage and disgust. But what kind of front page coverage does KC Elections get for a job well done? Zilch. Nada. Bupkis. For example, the non-profit, non-partisan Election Center — a national association of elections officials — just issued a glowing report on KC Elections’ performance during the Nov. 8 election… and I didn’t see front page coverage anywhere.

Nothing to see here folks. Move along.

I guess the Seattle Times just doesn’t find this newsworthy, and while the Seattle P-I did cover the report somewhere in today’s paper, it certainly wasn’t mentioned anywhere near the front page. The report’s conclusion?

“We observed a good election, conducted under extremely difficult circumstances — multiple facilities, a changing work force and intense public scrutiny,” the three-member team said. “The (King County) elections section has reason to be proud of the progress that has been made.”

Of course, government employees doing their job right shouldn’t ordinarily be front page news… but in the context of the intense (and sometimes misleading) coverage of problems encountered during the 2004 election, it is totally irresponsible to leave voters unaware of the improvements that have been made. Yes, a clean and accurate election does not make for a sexy headline, but considering how Logan and his crew have been publicly ridiculed and vilified over the past year, aren’t they owed a little bit of that balance the MSM likes to brag about so much?

Just thought I’d ask.

Man… am I a trendsetter, or what? Just the other day I post a Christmas Happy Holiday carol parody, and today James Vesely publishes a song parody of his own in the Seattle Times: “I’ve got those 2005 blues.”

As a bit of a lyricist myself (I’ve got an Off-Broadway musical flop to my credit), I thought Vesely did an okay job. He was a bit loosey-goosey with the rhyme and meter, but you can get away with that with the blues. Still, he’s no Ira Gershwin, and I suggest he stick to prose if he wants to keep his day job.

There is one verse in particular on which I have a few comments though….

Eyman and Sims,
not exactly twins
each got a kiss,
not always bliss
From the mainstream
media.
Which now consists
of bloggers who twist,
in their own
schizophrenia.

First… rhyming “media” and “schizophrenia”…? Ouch. That may be a good enough lyric for an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical, but no self-respecting lyricist would touch that one with a ten foot pole. I know a place where you can get a really great rhyming dictionary.

Second… are you suggesting that us bloggers are now part of the mainstream media? Is that meant as a compliment or an insult? And if I am now MSM… can I have a job?

Finally… we all know who you’re really talking about here, and I just have to say that I think it terribly rude and inappropriate to describe our friend Stefan as a schizophrenic. The more accurate diagnosis would be a paranoid delusional. (Perhaps with a bit of bipolar disorder thrown in.)

I was forwarded a couple precinct maps showing the vote on Initiative 912, and I thought the excerpt above was somewhat interesting. This map (PDF) shows those precincts which voted 70% or greater against I-912. Of course, the initiative was strongly opposed in Seattle, but look how poorly it did in Mercer Island, Bellevue and much of the Eastside.

I-912 — the love child of conservative KVI talk hosts John Carlson and Kirby Wilbur — was officially endorsed by the state GOP and many prominent Republicans… yet it went down big in traditionally Republican precincts. You might not know it yet by looking at the composition of the city councils, but these former GOP strongholds are steadily trending blue.

A year ago, in my post election analysis (“Subdivide and conquer: a strategy for a new Democratic majority“), I pointed towards this trend as one of the few hopeful signs coming out of the disappointing 2004 election:

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.

One shouldn’t read too much into the precinct maps from a single election, but the vote on I-912 certainly does nothing to counter the trend we’ve been seeing for years. Even as Democrats have lost ground in Eastern WA and other rural areas, we have gradually become the majority party in many populous, close-in suburbs.

But my sense is that this shift is as much a result of what the GOP has done wrong as it is what the Democrats have done right (or even, simple demographics.) I’m constantly hearing from self-described moderate Republicans who complain that their party has left them, rather than the other way around. The challenge for Democrats is to convince these suburban voters to change their party identification, not just their votes, much the same way the GOP eventually accommodated and absorbed the old southern Dixiecrats.

This process could take decades, so if you’re a Democrat, I’d take the map above with a grain of salt. But if you are Republican, I advise you to take it with a couple of aspirins and fifth of whiskey, for there’s nothing about these trends that looks good for your party’s prospects.

Yesterday’s dramatic vote, in which the Senate failed to extend the Patriot Act, was a huge defeat for the GOP leadership and the ever weakening Bush administration. But though it is tempting to dwell on the inside politics, that would only serve to distract from the crucial issue at hand… whether the very basic human liberties we are supposedly defending against terrorists can survive our so-called “War on Terror.”

The Patriot Act had been hastily passed during the understandable hysteria that followed 9/11, with few legislators actually having the time to read the actual bill. But recognizing the importance of protecting the civil liberties that have made our nation the envy of all others, Congress wisely set an expiration date on the Act, so that it’s provisions could be more carefully reconsidered at a later time. Unable to get more protections into the reauthorization, Senate Democrats, along with several key conservative Republican Senators, threatened filibuster. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist needed 60 votes to close debate, but could only garner 52.

WA Senators Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell both voted against cloture. Sen. Cantwell, who rushed back from observing the elections in Iraq to cast her vote, had this to say about her reasoning:

“The federal government has a responsibility to protect our nation from those who may bring terror into our homes. It also has a responsibility to respect our rights and honor our privacy. These principles are not mutually exclusive: we can and must achieve both.”

That is the type of balance we desperately need to maintain if we are really going to protect our freedom. And that is the type of balance we risk losing should we replace Sen. Cantwell and provide President Bush with another reliable Republican vote in the Senate.

UPDATE:
Ken gave a link to this article in the comment threads, and I thought it was worth adding it to the post.

A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.”

The student had requested the book via an inter-library loan; he was told by agents that the book was on a “watch list” and that his background, which included significant time abroad, triggered an investigation. So what’s the harm, you righties might ask?

Dr. Williams said in his research, he regularly contacts people in Afghanistan, Chechnya and other Muslim hot spots, and suspects that some of his calls are monitored.

“My instinct is that there is a lot more monitoring than we think,” he said.

Dr. Williams said he had been planning to offer a course on terrorism next semester, but is reconsidering, because it might put his students at risk.

“I shudder to think of all the students I’ve had monitoring al-Qaeda Web sites, what the government must think of that,” he said. “Mao Tse-Tung is completely harmless.”

Of course, I suppose there are some on the right who might view this chilling effect as a happy little bonus.

Here’s your weekly sandbox. Poop away.

Wing-nuts roasting on an open fire,
Jack boots stomping through the snow,
Yuletide pundits join the paranoid choir
That claims that Christmas has a foe.

Bill O’Reilly knows this turkey of a president
Needs an enemy to fight,
So the ACLU, and George Soros too
Now find it hard to sleep at night.

They know the boobs who watch Fox News
Will blame the “War on Christmas” on the liberal Jews.
And every mother’s child will look in scorn,
To see if Soros really has devil’s horns.

And so I’m offering this simple phrase
To wing-nuts, one to ninety-two,
Although you’d prefer it be said different ways:
Happy Holidays… fuck you!

(With apologies to Mel Torme and Bob Wells… and nobody else.)

There are a handful of Republican senators who deserve a great deal of credit for standing up to the bullying of their own leadership.

The Senate on Friday rejected attempts to reauthorize several provisions of the USA Patriot Act as infringing too much on Americans’ privacy and liberty, dealing a huge defeat to the Bush administration and Republican leaders.

In a crucial vote early Friday, the bill’s Senate supporters were not able to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a threatened filibuster by Sens. Russ Feingold, D-Wis., and Larry Craig, R-Idaho, and their allies. The final vote was 52-47.

Feingold and Craig want to extend the Patriot Act in its current form for several months so that the Senate has time to add more civil liberties protections, but Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist has refused. The failure to close off debate and bring the bill to a vote came in the wake of today’s New York Times report that Bush authorized domestic surveillance of phone calls and emails of thousands of private citizens.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

“This is really a sea change,” said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. “It’s almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches.”

Hey… remember the good old 1990’s, when the right-wing, whacko, militia-types spouted their paranoid fantasies about government intrusion and “black helicopters” and all that? Should it be any surprise that now that these same wing-nuts are running the country, they’re attempting to use on the rest of us the exact same tactics they imagined were once being used on them?

Okay… maybe that’s overstating things. But to those ardent GOP loyalists who would defend the Bush administration turning our intelligence apparatus inward, authorizing domestic spying on US citizens without court order… would you be so cavalier about our civil liberties if the enormous power of the state rested in the hands of a Democratic administration? Because if we still have a democracy, you’ve got to expect that it will eventually.

You know, there’s this other local blogger who’s name escapes me at the moment, who claims to be all over election reform and all that, and I’ve been waiting all day to see his analysis of the reform package proposed yesterday by Secretary of State Sam Reed (a Republican)… but so far, nada. Hmm. I guess for some people election reform isn’t really election reform unless it makes it harder to vote.

Reed’s proposal (PDF), on the other hand, is actually quite sensible, and includes two major provisions: moving the primary to August, and allowing for online voter registration via the SOS website.

Ask any county auditor in the state, and they’ll tell you that their number one reform priority is moving the primary… preferably to the spring, but they’ll take August if that’s what they can get. Reed’s proposal moves the primary from the 3rd Tuesday in September to the 3rd Tuesday in August, giving elections officials a much needed cushion before ballots go out for the general election. Reed’s proposal also makes a few other tweaks in this area, increasing the time for certifying a primary from 10 to 15 days, and requiring military and overseas ballots to be mailed out 30 days before the election (an impossible timeline under the current system.) Reed would also ease the legislative fundraising freeze to help accommodate the accelerated schedule.

Reed’s other major proposal would allow voters with a WA state driver’s license or state ID card to register to vote online; the SOS would obtain the voter’s signature from the Department of Licensing to pull into the voter rolls. This is an incredibly progressive, efficient, cost effective reform that would make WA only the second state to allow online voter registration. The only reason I can see why someone might argue against it would be if they don’t want to make it easier for citizens to register to vote. (Um… I expect there to be some passionate opposition.)

There are a bunch of other lower profile reforms in Reed’s proposal, mostly dealing with cleaning up the election statutes, and clarifying some of the rules regarding ballot measure petitions. One change that immediate stood out to me would make it “a gross misdemeanor to circulate a petition that appears to support a measure that differs from the actual measure attached to the petition.” Hmm. I wonder if that would apply to say, the time Eyman printed a petition for a property tax cut initiative with the headline “No New Income Tax!”…? Sure hope so.

While there are other reforms I would like to see, all in all, I can’t find anything in Reed’s proposal that I might object to. After the recent escalation of partisan tensions over the GOP’s voter challenge debacle, I was kind of dreading Reed’s proposal, but once again he has pleasantly surprised me. This appears to be a package of reasonable, modest reforms, and I hope beyond hope that it receives the kind of bipartisan support it deserves.

My what a difference a year makes. It wasn’t so long ago that the national GOP had targeted Sen. Maria Cantwell as the most vulnerable Democratic incumbent in 2006, while WA state Republicans were drooling over what they saw as the inevitable backlash over the 2004 gubernatorial election contest. Now, less than a year before the election, things don’t look so hot for them.

Last week I reported that both Rasmussen and GOP pollster Strategic Vision show Cantwell at the magic 50% or better against anointed challenger Mike McGavick… and now the new SurveyUSA poll is the latest to show Cantwell’s approval ratings tracking up, 55% to 34%, her net approval rising 9 points since last month’s survey. Far from being vulnerable, Cantwell now ranks right in the middle of the 100 senator pack, and most impressively, she now enjoys positive net approval across nearly every demographic group in the state.

What explains her sudden popularity? Well, she’s finally getting a little press around here, but my guess is that voters are beginning to pay a little more attention now that the 2005 election is over and McGavick is making a little more news. Absent an opponent, approval ratings can be a little nebulous, but voters, particularly Democrats and independents, are beginning to view Cantwell in the context of a head-to-head with McGavick. Indeed, Cantwell’s biggest jump was with voters who identify themselves as liberals. There may still be some resentment in this group over a handful of Cantwell’s votes, but they’re realists; no self-respecting liberal is going to hand this seat over to an insurance industry lackey like McGavick.

There was a time when state R’s expected the national party to pour lavish sums into this race, but it’s beginning to look like that money would be better spent defending Representatives Dave Reichert and Cathy McMorris. (And who knows… maybe even “Doc” Hastings.)

Wednesday the House of Representatives voted 308-122 to bar torture of military detainees, and I just thought it curious to note that the only member of the WA state delegation to vote against this measure calling for the ethical treatment of prisoners was none other than House Ethics chair Richard “Doc” Mengele Hastings. Makes you proud to be a Washingtonian, huh?

Here’s a guy who can’t even vote against the GOP leadership when it comes to something as basic as torture… and we expect him to impartially investigate members of his own party?

I just hope, for the sake of consistency, that if his committee ever gets around to investigating the likes of Representatives Tom DeLay and Bob Ney, his investigators utilize the same inhumane interrogation techniques Hastings endorses for use by our military. I’m guessing a couple hours of going Abu Ghraib on their sorry congressional asses would not only blow the whole Abramoff scandal wide open, but might also end with DeLay confessing to being the gunman on the grassy knoll.

For those of you offended by the “hypocrite fish” (which by the way, I think was intended to ridicule hypocrites, not Christians), I’m sure you’ll enjoy this new holiday music video by comedienne Sarah Silverman: “Give The Jew Girl Toys”

(Thanks to Eli Sanders of Slog for the tip.)

I just gotta pass on this amusing exchange between outgoing council members Dwight Pelz and David Irons. It’s not verbatim, and it’s from a secondhand source who wasn’t in council chambers at the time, but I’m just a lowly blogger, so secondhand, paraphrased accounts are good enough for me.

Apparently, during the course of a discussion of something or other during the council meeting, Pelz mentioned that he’s running for chairman of the state Democratic Party. Irons piped up, “Can I vote for you?” And Pelz shoots back, “No, but your sister can.” After a pause, Pelz added, “In fact, I’m hoping for four votes out of your family.”

Gotta laugh.

(For those who don’t know, Irons’ sister Di is the State Committeewoman from the 5th Legislative District, and thus will definitely have a vote in January’s election of a new state chair.)

One of the primary recommendations of the Independent Task Force on Elections appointed earlier this year by King County Executive Ron Sims was the creation of an outside “turnaround team” to evaluate and, if necessary, shakeup management of the elections department. In following through on his promise to follow the task force’s recommendation, Sims has chosen a contractor and requested $1.35 million from the council.

But now, as the council balks at appropriating the money, it’s own independent Citizen’s Election Oversight Committee is recommending against hiring a turnaround team at all.

Several members of the Citizens’ Election Oversight Committee, reconvened by the County Council after errors in the 2004 election, said Tuesday that the elections division has made great strides in improving the elections process.

But League of Women Voters representative Joan Thomas said a turnaround team could end up “turning around every bit of progress we’ve made, and starting all over again.”

The county virtually eliminated the mishandling of provisional ballots and dramatically improved its ballot accounting in the November election.

“It’s too late” for a turnaround team, committee chairman A.J. Culver said.

While administration insiders have previously assured me that Sims fully intends to follow the Task Force’s advice, and that Dean Logan’s fate would eventually be determined by the turnaround team’s recommendations, there has also been some internal debate over whether the turnaround team might disrupt the reforms already underway. The general administration consensus is that procedural improvements within elections have already been dramatic — an evaluation strongly echoed by the Citizens Oversight Committee — but that the turnaround team could be useful in recognizing and fixing the “cultural” and management issues that have long afflicted the department. Sims and his staff have also considered the turnaround team a necessary step towards restoring public faith in the system.

In telling the Seattle Times that Sims welcomed the council’s thoughts on a turnaround team, administration spokesman Sandeep Kaushik didn’t so much backpedal as he did leave the door open to reconsideration.

“We did make a commitment to the task force, which is the group that Executive Sims created, to implement this turnaround-team idea. That remains our position at this point.”

Well, at this point, the Council won’t be ready to vote on appropriating funds for the turnaround team until they reconvene in January… right around the time the Task Force is scheduled to reconvene as well. Considering how much is at stake both in terms of money and in continuing the successful transformation that is already occurring in the elections department, the first task before the Task Force should be to reevaluate their turnaround team recommendation in light of the improvements that have already been made.

After successful primary and general elections, the Citizens Oversight Committee seems downright enthusiastic about the improvements they have seen, while council members on both sides of the aisle seem to be questioning whether a turnaround team is still necessary. If the Task Force publicly agrees and drops this recommendation, it will save taxpayers $1.35 million, while further shoring up public faith in the system.

I’m not suggesting that just because KC elections has managed to run a couple of smooth elections, all the endemic cultural issues have been solved… but there are less dramatic and costly remedies. A management consultant could be brought in to review operations and make recommendations. Or perhaps State Auditor Brian Sonntag might be invited to come in and conduct one of those much-ballyhooed performance audits… on the state’s dime.

In any case, I think it’s time for everyone to stop viewing KC elections through the prism of the hyperbolic election contest controversy, and start evaluating it based on its recent performance. We may discover that a turnaround team is a solution in search of a problem that no longer exists.

Yesterday came more bad news for embattled vote counting rigging machine manufacturer Diebold. On Monday, Diebold CEO Walden O’Dell unexpectedly resigned due “personal reasons,” one day before a securities fraud class action suit was filed against him, Diebold, and seven other current and former officers. (RawStory has more details on the company’s woes from Diebold insider “Dieb-Throat.”)

Well, now comes word from Black Box Voting that a major security flaw has prompted Leon County Florida supervisor of elections Ion Sancho to announce that he will never again use Diebold in an election, and will request funds to replace the Diebold system in his county.

A test election was run in Leon County on Tuesday with a total of eight ballots. Six ballots voted “no” on a ballot question as to whether Diebold voting machines can be hacked or not. Two ballots, cast by Dr. Herbert Thompson and by Harri Hursti voted “yes” indicating a belief that the Diebold machines could be hacked.

At the beginning of the test election the memory card programmed by Harri Hursti was inserted into an Optical Scan Diebold voting machine. A “zero report” was run indicating zero votes on the memory card. In fact, however, Hursti had pre-loaded the memory card with plus and minus votes.

The eight ballots were run through the optical scan machine. The standard Diebold-supplied “ender card” was run through as is normal procedure ending the election. A results tape was run from the voting machine.

Correct results should have been: Yes:2 ; No:6

However, just as Hursti had planned, the results tape read: Yes:7 ; No:1

The results were then uploaded from the optical scan voting machine into the GEMS central tabulator, a step cited by Diebold as a protection against memory card hacking. The central tabulator is the “mother ship” that pulls in all votes from voting machines. However, the GEMS central tabulator failed to notice that the voting machines had been hacked.
The results in the central tabulator read:

Yes:7 ; No:1

Of course, the fact that a system can be hacked, doesn’t mean it has been hacked. It should be noted that while this is exactly the same type of Diebold system used in King County and throughout much of WA state, our state’s electoral integrity survived the most grueling and definitive test of all: the 2004 gubernatorial hand recount. Apart from the ballots legally added between tabulations, the difference between the hand and machine counts was statistically insignificant, proving that there was no manipulation of the data coming from the optical scanners or the GEMS central tabulator.

Curiously, one of the election “reforms” pushed by WA state Republicans is to remove hand recounts from our election procedures, thus eliminating the most definitive check on our automated vote tabulation systems. Hmmm.

The lesson that should be learned from all this is that the franchise is simply too valuable to trust to proprietary software from a private corporation. The only way to assure the integrity of our vote tabulation system is to move towards one based on open source software.

Rep. Doc Hastings, a Republican from Eastern Washington, should be ashamed of himself for allowing the House ethics committee he chairs to turn into a dysfunctional joke. It is an embarrassment to the state, to the country and even to the Republican Party that swept to power on the promise of clean government.

The Olympian’s editorial board doesn’t mince words in this editorial sticking it to Hastings for fiddling while the House burns around him.

It’s time for Hastings to stop his petty squabbling with the Democrats and start doing his job. Lord knows there is plenty to do at a time when one representative is headed for prison for accepting bribes and former House ma-jority leader Tom DeLay is under indictment in a Texas campaign finance scheme. Yet Congress has no functional ethics committee to hold elected leaders accountable.

The Republican leadership gave Hastings the job exactly because of his reputation as a do-nothing congressman, and they are getting exactly what they expected: absolutely nothing. Last year, committee chair Rep. Joel Hefley (R-CO), two other members, and most of the committee staff were purged after the panel twice voted to admonish Rep. Tom DeLay (R-TX). After a year under Hastings “leadership” a new chief of staff is still not in position, and investigators haven’t even been hired. Meanwhile, seven lawmakers have either been indicted, convicted, pled guilty, or are under investigation for bribery, money laundering, conspiracy and other crimes.

“There is no ethics enforcement in Congress today, and it’s inexcusable,” said Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative monitor of government ethics.

“No matter what level of corruption the members of Congress engage in, the ethics committees do nothing,” said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the liberal-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. “It’s a national embarrassment.”

It certainly is, and it’s humiliating that a Washington state lawmaker is part of the problem.

My has Hastings star risen. Formerly just an embarrassment to the 4th CD, he’s now humiliating the entire state, prompting both the Olympian and the Tacoma News Tribune to editorialize against Hastings inexcusable recalcitrance. Hmmm… I wonder when the Seattle Times editorial board — which fancies itself our state’s paper of record — will weigh in on Hastings shameful performance as chair of the Ethics Committee?