HorsesAss.Org

TJ over at Also Also has posted a thorough reporting of the transcript of Chelan County Judge John Bridges rulings, and how they might impact Dino Rossi’s prospects of setting aside the gubernatorial election. (Cliff Notes Version: “It don’t look so good for Rossi.”)

TJ split his post between the morning session (Part I) and the afternoon session (Part II). For the sake of dramatic arc, read both. But if you just want to skip to the juicy stuff, go straight to Part II. I won’t post in detail on the entire transcript, because TJ’s fine analysis has sufficiently satisfied my latently wonkish tendencies. Instead, I thought I’d focus on the all important issue of the burden of proof.

While Judge Bridges never explicitly rules on the burden of proof necessary to set aside an election, TJ correctly points out that he drops several huge hints. One of the biggest is when he discusses RCW 29A.68.110‘s apparently high standard for setting aside an election. Judge Bridges explains:

This same requirement was recognized early in our state’s history when in 1912 our Supreme Court in Hill v. Howell held that when there was no evidence to show for whom the elector voted and because both candidates were innocent of wrongdoing, the vote must be treated between the parties as a legitimate vote.

Remember everything I’ve written about how acceptance of uncertainty is implicit in our election statutes? Well this very pragmatic principle is clearly expressed in an excerpt from Hill v. Howell, which TJ courteously provides to his readers:

An election honestly conducted under the forms of law ought generally to stand, notwithstanding individual electors may have been deprived of their votes, or unqualified voters been allowed to participate. Individuals may suffer wrong in such cases, and a candidate who was the real choice of the people may sometimes be deprived of his election; but it is generally impossible to arrive at any greater certainty of result by resort to oral evidence, public policy is best subserved by allowing the election to stand, and trusting to a strict enforcement of the criminal laws for greater security against the like irregularities and wrongs in the future.

TJ calls this the “Shit Happens” ruling, and while it may offend the sensibilities of Rossi supporters, this is exactly why they will find a court of law to be a much tougher venue than the court of public opinion. They can allege all the felon votes they want, but according to RCW 29A.68.110, unless they can prove these votes likely changed the outcome, well… shit happens.

In moving on from illegal votes to other irregularities, Judge Bridges again signals that he believes the same high burden of proof should apply. He points out that few election contests succeed, and he suggests that there are “some well-recognized presumptions, if not policy reasons, why elections should not be overturned.”

For instance, do we as voters and as constituents of candidates want to engage in what one judge referred to as seasons of discontent commencing the moment after the polls close on election day.

Um… I don’t. But apparently Dino Rossi, Chris Vance, the BIAW and right-wing bloggers and talk-radio hosts have no compunction about trashing the integrity of our electoral process in the interest of a short-term political gain.

If, as the Rossi campaign continues to claim, they need only show that there were more errors or illegal votes than Gregoire’s 129-vote margin, it would be an invitation to contest nearly every close election. How close is too close? If Mark Sidran had challenged Deborah Senn’s victory in the attorney general primary, could the contest ever have been decided in time for the general election?

These are pragmatic considerations, embodied in law, and that’s why (un)Sound Politic’s OCD-like focus on the so-called voter-credit “discrepancy” is a legal red herring. They continue to cry scandal, charging that King County has not proven it actually reconciled the election results… but they have the burden of proof exactly backwards. As Judge Bridges explains:

Our Supreme Court has observed that election officers are presumed to have complied with the duties required of them in an honest and careful manner. That was the Quigley case. And also in Quigley the Court noted that the returns of any election official are entitled to the presumption of regularity…. And in McCormick v. Okanogan County in 1978, the Supreme Court observed that informality of irregularity in an election that does not affect the result is not sufficient to invalidate the election.

King County didn’t properly reconcile election returns? Prove it. Subpoena the binder and the poll books and prove they didn’t do their job. I think the court will agree that “the duties required” of KC Elections do not necessarily include giving Snark everything he wants in .XLS file format.

But let’s forget for a moment what is or is not an “irregularity,” and get back to the burden of proof for such “misconduct.” On this, Judge Bridges could not be clearer:

With respect to misconduct, whether that misconduct falls in 020 or 011, I think the standard is 29A.68.070, and so I want to say that so you folks have some sense of what I think the ultimate standard of proof is and what the petitioners have to show.

Stick a Foulkes in it, this case is done!

For those of you have followed my analysis (“Foolish Foulkes“) based on my correspondence with “Lawyer X”, I’m beginning to look awfully damn smart right about now. Rossi’s attorneys have based their case primarily on Foulkes v. Hays, claiming the court is not constrained by the narrow standards and remedies set out in the contest statute. But as I previously pointed out, Foulkes was decided on a section (now .011) that has since been pulled inside the framework of the contest statute. Rather than considering .011 in isolation, Judge Bridges has clearly stated that its burden of proof is that set forth under .070.

And in perhaps his most devastating ruling of the day (at least, to Rossi), Judge Bridges indicates that, unlike Foulkes, the contest statute constrains available remedies as well.

I would note first that the Foulkes case, which is indeed a case that I relied on heavily today, I’m sure to the consternation of the intervenors, has now been cited again to me by the petitioners, but at this time I’m going to distinguish the Foulkes case from what I have to decide here because in the Foulkes case, our Supreme Court was faced with the prospect of addressing the election of a county commissioner. And here, this Court is faced with a state executive officer and there are certain constitutional provisions that attach to a state executive officer.

The judge then goes on to cite several constitutional and statutory provisions, before concluding that “a statewide special election is not permitted by Washington’s election contest statute” nor the state constitution.

But a new election was exactly the remedy ordered by the court under .011 in the Foulkes decision. In Foulkes, the court reached to its “general equity jurisdiction” to order a new election, but Judge Bridges clearly and concisely concludes his ruling by stating:

The Court doesn’t have that authority under the statute, or the Constitution, and the Court thinks it should not exercise it on the grounds of equity.

If the court doesn’t have the authority to devise its own remedy, then it also doesn’t have the authority to devise its own standards, and thus the burden of proof is that set forth in .070 and .110. It is not enough that disputed ballots may have changed the outcome of the election, it must appear that illegal votes and other irregularities actually did change the outcome. We can argue all we want over the meaning of the word “appear” (the dictionary says “seems likely,”) but in order to prevail, it appears that Rossi must actually provide evidence that he received more legitimate votes than Gregoire.

I have quoted entirely from the afternoon session, but in closing I want to go all the way back to Judge Bridges first ruling of the day, when he narrowly ruled that the court had “subject matter jurisdiction” over the contest, but set the tone for the rest of the day by immediately citing Dumas v. Gagner as a caveat.

Election contests are governed by several general principles. Chief among them is the principle long followed by this Court that the judiciary should exercise restraint in interfering with the elective process which is reserved to the people in the state Constitution. Unless an election is clearly invalid, when the people have spoken, their verdict should not be disturbed by the courts.

“Clearly invalid.”

That’s a pretty high standard. As it should be.

I just sent the following email to Tim Eyman. Think he’ll accept my olive branch?

From: “David Goldstein” david@horsesass.org
Date: Wed Feb 23, 2005 12:38:53 AM US/Pacific
To: “Tim Eyman” insignia@greekwatch.com
Subject: Please join me in supporting SHJR 4205

Dear Tim,

I can’t tell you how much it saddens me that we haven’t been able to develop a more constructive, working relationship. Indeed, some might even describe us as downright adversarial.

For example, you sponsor an ill-conceived, boneheaded initiative, and I oppose it. You send out a deceptive, misleading press release, and I refute it. You cook the books to hide the fact that you are using initiative campaign contributions to fund your personal compensation committee, and I file a complaint with the Public Disclosure Commission.

And then, of course, there was that whole “Tim Eyman is a Horse’s Ass” initiative. While I’m sure we both had a good laugh at that one, I’m guessing we were probably on opposite sides of the issue. (I was for it.)

But I think I have finally found an issue we can both support.

This week the state House passed by a 73-25 margin, a constitutional amendment that would eliminate the 60% super-majority required by local school levies. The amendment faces a tougher challenge in the Senate, but if it passes by two-thirds, it will be sent before the people for their approval.

As a self-proclaimed champion of direct democracy, you have time and again admonished our elected officials and judges to honor the will of the people. In defense of your own initiatives — even the really, really stupid ones — you have argued that voters, not politicians, should be trusted to choose the kind of government they want. Thus I am confident that you will agree with me that the super-majority amendment can and should be decided directly by the voters… for to contend otherwise would be hypocritical.

That’s why I urge you to join me in asking the Senate to approve SHJR 4205. I suggest we draft a joint letter, instructing our respective supporters to contact their state senator, and demand that the people be given the opportunity to decide this important issue for themselves. Since I happen to have a copy of your list, I’d be happy to directly email your supporters on your behalf.

This is a terrific opportunity, not just to strike a blow for direct democracy, but for you to jump-start your stalled initiative career by supporting something that actually has a chance of passing. You’ve had two consecutive years without an electoral victory, and you’ve got to admit, this year’s performance audits initiative was dead on arrival. (Oh man… what were you thinking?) This is a chance for you to briefly be relevant again.

Given the opportunity to work together, I believe we can make a positive impact on all of Washington’s citizens, as well as learn a little something from one another. For example, I could teach you how to directly answer a reporter’s questions… and I understand you could teach me a few creative accounting tricks.

I look forward to our new partnership, and eagerly await your reply.

Affectionately yours,

David

Yesterday the state House passed by a 73-25 margin, a constitutional amendment that would eliminate Washington’s archaic 60% super-majority requirement for local school levies. While the bill passed with bipartisan support, it will face a much tougher battle in the more closely divided Senate. Constitutional amendments require a two-thirds vote in both houses of the Legislature, plus a simple majority by the people.

The 60% super-majority requirement for school levies is a relic of a bygone era, when Washington was predominantly an agricultural economy, and property taxes were the major source of revenue for both state and local governments. It was originally instituted to make it more difficult for townspeople in rural communities to dramatically drive up taxes on the surrounding landowners.

What might have made some sense in the Depression-era, agricultural economy of the 1930s, makes absolutely no sense in the post-industrial economy of the 21st century. The fact that most school levies pass, is a tribute to the common sense of Washington’s citizenry. But the fact that most just barely pass — or on the second or third try — is a warning of how financially fragile our struggling school districts already are.

Eliminating the super-majority requirement is not a recipe for runaway property taxes, as some Republicans contend. State law prohibits school districts from raising more than a certain percentage of their operating budgets from local levies, and most districts are already at or near their statutory limit. But that is beside the point. If a majority of voters choose to tax themselves to improve their children’s education, a minority of voters should not be able to stymy them.

Local school levies are held to a ridiculous and unsustainable standard. In a political climate where consensus is increasingly difficult to come by, a 60% margin would be considered a landslide for nearly any ballot measure or office outside of a gerrymandered safe district. Voters overwhelmingly support spending more money on education, and it is incomprehensible to deny the will of the people on the grounds that their support is not overwhelming enough. To continue to give 40% of voters veto power over investing in our children’s education, is not only bad policy… it’s undemocratic.

And in the end, democracy is what this is all about. Republican opponents in the Senate should be encouraged to put aside their concerns and let this issue be decided by the people. If a majority of the people decide that school levies should be decided by a majority of the people… well… you can’t get much more democratic than that.

In the wake of the Seattle P-I’s devastating deconstruction of King County’s so-called discrepancy as a “red herring, a flap over a postelection file-maintenance chore that has no bearing on the accuracy of the election returns,” Rossi supporters have started to respond by questioning whether King County actually followed the law, and reconciled election returns at all. Indeed, the always magnanimous Snark downright dismisses us “prolific fabulists from the lunatic-fringe blogs,” accusing us of delirium.

Gregoire’s delirious fans read this as conclusive exculpatory evidence. Those of us who inhabit the world of facts see this as the doughnut hole that it is: If this year’s ballot/vote credit discrepancy of 1800+ is incommensurate with the 2000 reconciliation discrepancy of 20, then what is the 2004 reconciliation discrepancy that is commensurate with the 2000 number? The article doesn’t say. As far as I can tell, King County has never released this number nor has it released any documents with precinct-by-precinct ballot reconcilation.

Gee, I dunno Stefan, if you really wanted to know if King County has made documents available on their precinct-by-precinct reconciliation, perhaps you might take a break from peeling that thick, orange skin off your “apple”, and… um… ask them? That’s what I did; I emailed KC Elections Director Dean Logan, and while I still have more questions to follow up, I think his answer sheds quite a bit of light on the subject:

Regarding the precinct/poll site reconciliation process, this is one of the upfront processes I have spoken about. We employ a canvassing crew that goes through the reconciliation worksheets in the poll books and compares the data to the precinct/poll site vote totals after Election Day. The 20+ canvassing crew members compare the totals generated from the vote tabulation system to the data provided by the poll workers. Where there is a discrepancy noted in this process, we “zero out” the vote totals for that location, retrieve the ballots (from sealed containers secured by the poll workers at the closing of the polls) and re-run those precincts. The crews worked 10-hour days, seven days a week in this effort.

Additionally, a notebook is maintained that tracks the count of signatures in the poll books, number of provisional ballots cast/submitted, number of absentee ballots returned at the polls, etc.

According to KC Elections Communications Specialist Bobbie Egan, in addition to the poll books, there is a “big binder” down at the office that contains all the reconciliation data Logan cited above, for all 2616 precincts. Unfortunately, there is no compilation of the data, but this is somewhat understandable considering the complicated and subjective nature of the reconciliation process itself.

“Subjective?” Well before my righty readers indignantly accuse me of a whitewash, let me explain.

King County has 2616 precincts, an unusually high number even considering our population, and most polling places serve multiple precincts. According to Egan, one of the most common polling place errors is for a voter to sign into Precinct A, only to have the little old lady hand him a ballot from Precinct B. (Yes… each precinct has its own distinct ballot.)

During the reconciliation process, this shows up as an extra voter in Precinct A, and an extra ballot in Precinct B.

Of course there could be a more nefarious explanation for such a discrepancy… for example, corrupt election workers might have stuffed an extra Gregoire ballot in Precinct B, and destroyed a Rossi one from Precinct A. Thus, in the snarky world of the right-wing blogs, this single error might be “evidence” of two fraudulent acts in favor of Gregoire.

Fortunately, there are additional controls in place. A ballot number is recorded in the poll book, and from this, the precinct number can be determined. (The number is detached to retain ballot secrecy.) To reconcile Precinct A, canvassers must go through the poll book, check all the ballot numbers, and find the voter(s) who received the wrong ballots. Then they must go to the other effected precincts and attach an explanation. But the end result is that there is still a discrepancy… an explained discrepancy, but a discrepancy nonetheless.

The Rossi camp would have you believe that this is all quite simple: just added up the numbers and see if they match. But that’s the easy part. There are many different reasons why discrepancies might creep into the reconciliation worksheets, and the part of the process that took two weeks of ten-hour shifts to complete, was figuring out exactly what these reasons were.

When a discrepancy could not be resolved or explained by the reconciliation worksheet or the ballot count or the poll books, the canvassers actually interviewed the poll workers to try to discern what happened. Logs and notes are kept of the entire reconciliation process, and stuffed inside that big fat binder. So yes, KC election workers put an incredible amount of work into precinct-by-precinct reconciliation, as required by law, prior to the initial certification date. But whether an individual discrepancy was sufficiently explained, so as to be considered more or less reconciled… well, that can indeed be somewhat subjective.

In talking with elections officials I had hoped that they might have a firm variance number, but they don’t. A county-wide number simply was not compiled, and to do so would require laboriously pouring through the binder and related data and documentation. And even then, what would the variance number represent, when a discrepancy sufficiently explained to my satisfaction might not satisfy the Snark?

Still, this binder and the poll books are sitting down there at KC Elections for anybody to inspect. And so I asked Egan if anybody — Rossi’s attorneys, the BIAW, know-it-all right-wing bloggers — had actually asked to see this binder, and she answered yes… a single Seattle reporter.

Which raises an important question. If Rossi supporters are so suspicious about whether King County actually reconciled the results of this election, why aren’t they interested in examining the actual reconciliation records? Why instead do they insist on focusing on voter creditation, a process that has absolutely nothing to do with precinct-by-precinct reconciliation?

The answers you get depend on the questions you ask. Apparently, the Rossi folk are only interested in getting the answers they want to hear.

A quick link to SPU political science professor Reed Davis’ guest column in today’s Seattle Times: “Why triple-talented Dean spells trouble for Republicans.”

Davis warns Republicans not to be so gleeful about Howard Dean’s ascension to DNC chair, noting that he’s a top-notch fund-raiser, a grassroots organizer, and a charismatic leader.

Dean’s appeal doesn’t lie primarily in the fact that he’s a great speaker (although he is) but in the fact that he’s a great listener.

Grass-roots activists in both parties have been so starved for attention and support during the past 20 years that they will flock to the first person who promises to listen and do what he can to support them.

And that, more than anything else, was the message that Dean took to the party faithful in his campaign for the party chairmanship: He’s there for them, not for the insiders, not for the professionals, and certainly not for the consultants. Dean will be there for the hardworking activists who make up the rank and file.

I was rather agnostic about the whole, very public battle over the DNC chairmanship. But I can’t say I was disappointed to see Dean triumph. I just hope he turns out to be as strong and visionary a leader as Davis suggests.

UPDATE:
Carla of Preemptive Karma attended the recent Howard Dean / Richard Perle debate in Portland, and blogged on it here.

I know some of you may find our friend Josef’s obsession with Dino Rossi spokesbabe Mary Lane a little annoying, but I find his youthful infatuation kind of cute… in a somewhat disturbing, Holden Caulfield sort of way.

So I don’t really mind the fact that he tried to freep me today.

Apparently distraught over his lady’s poor showing in my current stupid, lame-ass poll, Josef asked his pals over on Free Republic for help in freeping her numbers up. Love is always a noble cause, but alas they didn’t realize that I was cruelly toying with them from the start.

Every so often I’d take a break from my gardening, grab myself a glass of seltzer or a cup of tea… and change the poll results. Sometimes she’d go ahead for a while, and then suddenly she’s knocked back 25 points. (By now, Josef should be getting used to almost winning at the polls.)

It was rather amusing watching these people furtively (and futilely) work to manipulate a joke poll… especially considering the fact that the joke is at their expense. My lame-ass poll’s whole purpose is to poke fun at these bullshit online polls, so easily freeped as to make them utterly meaningless.

I mention this attempted freeping not just to poke well-deserved fun at Josef’s lovelorn e-stalking, but as an exclamation mark on my recent comments about the right-wing echo chamber. While only a handful of comrades came to Josef’s aid, national polls are often freeped by the tens of thousands. These are people so disrespectful of the opinions of others, that they will joyfully vandalize any public forum (like an online poll) in hopes of manipulating the public perception of public opinion.

That, my friends, is what we’re up against — not just the corporate propagandists foisting their fake news on an unsuspecting public — but a legion of amateur Goebbels wannabes, so eager to be part of a cause that they’ll even waste a beautiful, sunny, Sunday afternoon, pathetically freeping a joke poll.

The only thing more passionate than true love, is a true believer.

I’m lazily reclining, with my iBook on my lap, enjoying a hot cup of gunpowder green, and looking forward to spending a sunny Sunday in the garden, pruning my raspberries and planting peas, when I surf on over to The Seattle Times and… ahhh shit! I see the headline: “State’s election accuracy called into question.” Looks like I’m going to have to waste my morning refuting another bullshit hack job.

Then I read Eric Pryne’s article, and his companion piece (“Idea of closer scrutiny met with mixed reaction“), and he’s actually done quite a good job explaining a rather complicated subject. (I don’t know under what headlines these articles appear in hard copy, but whoever edits the home page deserves a rhetorical beating.)

Pryne actually cites the authoritative research conducted by the Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project, and while he doesn’t use the terminology, he discusses the two most common metrics for measuring the accuracy of elections, the “residual vote rate” and the “tabulation validation rate.” (Some of you may remember that these studies were the subject of a protracted pissing match between me and the Snark.)

The residual vote rate measures the percentage of ballots for which no vote was recorded in a major election like president or governor. Some of these “under votes” are surely intentional, but since similar precincts using different voting technology can have dramatically different residual vote rates, it can be assumed that some of the under vote is attributable to the voting technology — primarily, the way the voter interacts with it.

Numbers varied widely across the nation by ballot type, researchers found

Share:

• Tweet
• Email
• Print

Those of us reading the liberal blogs, or listening to Air America Radio, are well familiar with the fantastical tale of Jeff Gannon Jim Guckert, the fake reporter who managed to get credentialed by the security-conscious White House press office, under an assumed name. But most Americans have heard nary a peep about this scandal.

The Oregonian — whose own news pages have not mentioned this story once — uses “Gannon” as a springboard to editorialize today on a curious paradox… that the right-wing blogs seem to have so much more influence over the so-called liberal press, than us “lefties.”

Those inclined to accept right-wing mythology about the “left-wing mainstream media” should consider for a moment the sensational story of fake White House reporter “Jeff Gannon.”

Never heard of him? That’s not surprising. Mainstream news outlets have scarcely touched it. Yet it’s been raging for weeks on left-leaning Web sites, which so far have been unable to elevate the story beyond the blogosphere.

Bloggers on the right, by comparison, have enjoyed spectacular success getting the supposedly leftist media to heed and advance their journalistic agenda. This creates a fertile new issue for industry researchers: Why is it that Internet bloggers on the left, compared with those on the right, have so much less demonstrable influence on mainstream journalism?

Hmmm… great question, Oregonian Editorial Board. Perhaps you could ask, gee, I don’t know… your own news editors?

I was all set to exercise my talmudic tendencies on the Oregonian editorial, when I noticed that the recently re-mottoed Columbian Watch had already made most of my points: “GannonGuckert the editorial.” But I would particularly like to echo the following comment:

I’m also a little uncomfortable with the idea that “left-wing” bloggers are somehow not as effective as “right-wing” bloggers. If you call lying, race baiting and dissembling effective, then yeah, the righties are pretty good at it. They’ve had a lot of practice at it in the last 25 years, and they have a fully functioning infrastructure to support it. It’s a lot easier to march in lockstep when your facts are manufactured in faux think tanks and distributed across the landscape in easily digestible form.

As long as the right-wing bloggers continue to get free promotion on conservative talk radio (and the BIAW keeps mailing out Ukrainian-themed post cards advertising their websites,) the righties will continue to hold a circulation advantage over bloggers like me. I cannot tell you how gratifying it has been to watch HA quickly grow into Washington’s most widely read liberal blog; and you should all be proud of yourselves for contributing to comment threads that arguably host the most passionate, informed and productive political debates of any blog in the state. But if we want to compete with the right, we’re going to have to do a better job of promoting ourselves within and without our community.

If blogs like HA have become an important part of your daily routine, we need your help in getting the word out. Email our links to friends, family and co-workers. Shamelessly promote us at dinner parties and bar mitzvahs, or to complete strangers at the bus stop. Go to your other favorite blogs, local or national, and harangue them to add our links to their blogrolls.

Many, many journalists stop by HA on a daily basis… but not all. When you catch a reporter or editorialist mindlessly repeating a scrap of right-wing rhetoric, drop them an email citing a refutation found on one of your favorite blogs. The MSM needs to know that blogs like HA are not just a great place for alternative analysis and opinion (and the occasional swear word,) but also for cold, hard facts.

Blogging is an experiment in open source journalism that will go dangerously awry if it is ends up being dominated by one side of the political spectrum. The other guys have an infrastructure advantage: the right-wing echo chamber that has been meticulously constructed over the past several decades. If we’re going to match their volume — in both senses of the word — we’re going to have to rely on community… and hard work.

I asked Lawyer X to summarize today’s order by Judge Bridges, and to explain the significance, if any.

As to the order itself, no change. He simply signed the transcript. The GOP asked for an April 4 trial date and the judge dashed their hopes of any rush to trial. He said he could not begin to set a trial date until he resolved whether they could use their proportional reduction method of guessing the impact of errors and votes, or whether they would have to follow existing Washington law and prove how the votes were cast. He also said he would not set a trial until both sides agreed their discovery was done.

Translation: the GOP has not convinced him they can use a shortcut to prove their case (which case they have previously said they couldn’t prove anyway) and they have not convinced him there is any great injustice here that would require haste in resolution.

Spokeswoman Mary Lane is trying to spin today’s order as some sort of huge victory for Dino Rossi, but these days, just getting out of bed in the morning is probably a big victory for Dino. The Democrats had hoped Judge Bridges would clarify the Feb. 4 transcript, but the more I read through it, the more it looks to me like the Dems should be mighty comfortable with today’s status quo ruling.

I’ll comment more on this later, but one particularly interesting point in Lawyer X’s comments is the mention of GOP efforts to use a “proportional reduction method” for estimating the impact of errors and illegal votes. While such a method might dramatically lessen Rossi’s burden of proof, it also seems to be an acknowledgment that they will have to prove something. Still, it seems like an awfully long shot, considering the relatively small number of illegal votes and true irregularities alleged thus far.

In any case, I don’t think Dems are going to lose much sleep over today’s hearing.

From The Seattle Times: “Judge refuses to clarify revote rulings.” And talk about stating the obvious, don’t you just love this sub-headline from the Times’ home page?

But agrees that standards of proof for illegal votes is an important issue.

Well duh-uh. Judge Bridges said this issue should be decided in pre-trial hearings, and refused to set an April court date as requested by Republicans. More news later… assuming there is any.

Don’t be so quick to euthanize the mainstream media.

While a bunch of us liberal bloggers have been trying for weeks to convincingly explain why King County’s variance between voters credited and ballots cast is an irrelevant load of crap, it took a real reporter doing real reporting to finally, finally get the story straight. The Seattle P-I’s Neil Modie actually bothers to interview experts, ask them pertinent questions, and accurately report their responses in context. (I gotta get me one of them journalism schoolbooks.)

The result is a definitive answer to the question of what this so-called “discrepancy” really means. (Hint: absolutely nothing.)

The head of the nation’s largest election system thinks King County displayed amazing accuracy in a bureaucratic process that the Republican Party is focusing on in its attempt to overturn the governor’s election.

But Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters Conny McCormack also thinks it’s irrelevant.

While King County officials defend the process in question as highly accurate and GOP critics call it shockingly inaccurate, McCormack said it’s a red herring, a flap over a postelection file-maintenance chore that has no bearing on the accuracy of the election returns.

“It has nothing to do with the ballot-counting. It’s a separate process,” she said this week. A nationally recognized authority on election administration and reform, McCormack made the comments in an interview given at the urging of King County election officials.

The criticism, she said, is “maligning the accuracy of the count based on something that has nothing to do with the accuracy of the count.”

Oh man… do you really need it spelled out any clearer than that? Well if so, Modie obliges:

After election results are certified, election workers electronically scan voters’ signatures into records. The purpose is to record, for future elections, who voted in the last one so that registration files can be purged of inactive voters and political parties and campaigns can obtain voters’ names and voting-frequency data.

Logan and McCormack said that record-keeping process, which they said is susceptible to human error, is being confused with the process of reconciling the number of ballots cast at each precinct and the number of people who voted at each precinct.

Those two numbers are supposed to be matched up before the final results are certified 15 days after the election. Logan said that’s the necessary check on election accuracy.

“It’s apples and oranges,” McCormack said. “I think someone is trying to confuse” the two (processes).

Ya think?

Of course, GOPolitburo Chair Chris “I’m rubber you’re glue” Vance accuses Democrats of trying to create confusion, calling the explanation “smoke and mirrors and jargon and gobbledygook.” Meanwhile, soon-to-be-unemployed Rossi spokesperson Mary Lane admits to being confused herself, saying it “makes no sense to me. They’re trying to condescend to us and say, ‘Oh, you don’t understand.'”

Um… Mary… maybe that’s because you don’t understand. Perhaps a fellow Republican can better explain it to you.

Secretary of State Reed said he thinks most counties don’t even calculate voter-crediting variances “because it’s not particularly relevant to anything meaningful.”

How devastating is Modie’s article to the Republican’s manufactured outrage? Well one of the state GOP’s leading outrage manufacturers, Sound Politics, seems downright tongue tied. Indeed, the Snark’s only rebuttal is to ridicule LA County Elections for being even more inaccurate than King County.

But then, to address the rest of the article would force Snark to issue a correction for comments he attributed to former KC Elections Director Bob Bruce:

I spoke with Bob Bruce later on Monday afternoon. He doesn’t recall the exact number of the 2000 discrepancy but said it was “under 20”. Bruce also told me that in his 12 years in senior positions at King County elections he never saw a discrepancy that was anywhere near as large as the 2004 discrepancy and can’t imagine what would explain it.

Well either Snark didn’t understand the issue well enough to ask the right questions… or he didn’t understand Bruce’s answers, for as Modie (the real journalist) reports:

Bruce, who was King County elections superintendent and later the records and elections director for 13 years, until 2002, said that discrepancy wasn’t even calculated when he was there because it wasn’t necessary, and it “should not be an issue” now.

“We never bothered doing a comparison (of the variance with those of previous elections) because we never needed to,” Bruce said. “But I would guess that it would probably have been about the same number” as the 2004 variance.

Bruce was quoted recently as saying the discrepancy in the 2000 presidential election was less than 20 votes. But yesterday he explained, “We’re not talking about crediting. We’re talking about the variance between the number of names in the poll book and the number of people who voted,” a reflection of actual election-return accuracy.

If that type of discrepancy turns up in a precinct-by-precinct reconciliation of the election canvassing process, Logan said, “then we run (returns from) that polling place again” during the canvass to find the error.

So there it is. Now we all understand what “The Discrepancy” is, and what it isn’t. And we owe it all to (gasp) the MSM.

UPDATE:
While we’re on the subject of public misconceptions about the integrity of the election, I thought I’d add this comment from Republican Secretary of State Sam Reed (from the transcript of a live chat published in The Olympian, via WashBlog, via Progressive Majority for Washington):

Moderator: Anything, Sam, you want so say that you haven’t had a chance to address? Any urban myths?

Reed: Actually, there is, you are right. A frustration of mine as a person with considerable experience in the field of elections is that some of the rumors of errors, mistakes, illegalities, were absolutely incorrect, but because of the Internet, blogs and talk radio, they were circulated rapidly and extensively and helped contribute to the loss of confidence and trust in the system. I would hope in the future that the people who operate these blogs and the talk radio hosts will exercise the caution and ethics of the journalism profession, and that will help the citizery understand what really happened in the election process.

Hear that Stefan? Sam’s talking to you.

Back when I was an aspiring lyricist and playwright in New York, I feared and hated New York Times senior theater critic Frank Rich, for his power to instantly kill a new production with a review so brilliantly vicious, it was often more entertaining than the show it critiqued.

(How’s that for a biographical tidbit? As it it turns out, my musical, “The Don Juan and the Non-Don Juan” drew the equally savage NY Times critic Mel Gussow, who occasionally prefaced his reviews of musicals with the caveat that he doesn’t like musicals. Needless to say, we closed after three weeks.)

Since then, we’ve both moved on… me, to I-don’t-know-what, and Rich to well-deserved prominence as a NY Times columnist. Rich is possibly the best writer at what is probably the nation’s best written newspaper (whatever your take on its editorial bias.) While you are more likely to find his columns in the Arts section than in Op/Ed, Rich has an uncanny knack for weaving together politics and culture into thoughtful, informative essays that often surprise the reader with the amount of social relevance drawn from deceptively simple subjects.

Take for example Sunday’s column about the bizarre right-wing campaign against Clint Eastwood’s new film, “Million Dollar Baby.” (“How Dirty Harry Turned Commie“) Rush Limbaugh rails against its “liberal propaganda” and Michael Medved says that “hate is not too strong a word” to describe his review of the movie. (He was always a pretty crappy movie reviewer.) Why all the fuss? Because the film doesn’t explicitly take a position against euthanasia, and in this you’re-with-us-or-against-us world, that apparently is enough to spark moral outrage from the right.

“I never thought about the political side of this when making the film,” Mr. Eastwood says. He is both bemused and concerned that a movie with no political agenda should be construed by some as a polemic and arouse such partisan rage. “Maybe I’m getting to the age when I’m starting to be senile or nostalgic or both, but people are so angry now,” he adds. “You used to be able to disagree with people and still be friends. Now you hear these talk shows, and everyone who believes differently from you is a moron and an idiot – both on the right and the left.”

Hmmm… sounds like much of the blogosphere, huh?

In today’s column (“The White House Stages Its ‘Daily Show’“), Rich deftly digs into the controversy surrounding the outing of Jeff Gannon Jim Guckert, the fake White House correspondent (for the equally fake Talon News Service) who was known for lobbing leading, softball questions to the President and his press secretary. For nearly two years the White House press office credentialed Guckert, under an assumed name.

How this happened is a mystery that has yet to be solved. “Jeff” has now quit Talon News not because he and it have been exposed as fakes but because of other embarrassing blogosphere revelations linking him to sites like hotmilitarystud.com and to an apparently promising career as an X-rated $200-per-hour “escort.” If Mr. Guckert, the author of Talon News exclusives like “Kerry Could Become First Gay President,” is yet another link in the boundless network of homophobic Republican closet cases, that’s not without interest. But it shouldn’t distract from the real question – that is, the real news – of how this fake newsman might be connected to a White House propaganda machine that grows curiouser by the day. Though Mr. McClellan told Editor & Publisher magazine that he didn’t know until recently that Mr. Guckert was using an alias, Bruce Bartlett, a White House veteran of the Reagan-Bush I era, wrote on the nonpartisan journalism Web site Romenesko, that “if Gannon was using an alias, the White House staff had to be involved in maintaining his cover.” (Otherwise, it would be a rather amazing post-9/11 security breach.)

By Rich’s count, “Gannon” is now the sixth “journalist” to have been unmasked as “a propagandist on the payroll of either the Bush administration or an arms-length ally.” And the fake news generated by these fake journalists represents only the tip of the iceberg of this administration’s unprecedented domestic propaganda machine.

When the Bush administration isn’t using taxpayers’ money to buy its own fake news, it does everything it can to shut out and pillory real reporters who might tell Americans what is happening in what is, at least in theory, their own government. Paul Farhi of The Washington Post discovered that even at an inaugural ball he was assigned “minders” – attractive women who wouldn’t give him their full names – to let the revelers know that Big Brother was watching should they be tempted to say anything remotely off message.

That’s more than just aggressive PR… that’s fascism.

Rich suggests that the only solution might be to “fight fake with fake,” and half-jokingly proposes naming Jon Stewart to succeed Dan Rather at CBS News. That’s exactly the type of subtle insight I’ve come to expect from the “arts and culture” columnist who provides some of the best political commentary in the mainstream media.

TJ at AlsoAlso plies the snark infested waters once again with a round-up of recent paranoid rantings from the aluminum millineries over at (un)Sound Politics.

Amongst the topics is our good friend Stefan’s personal crusade to rid our voter rolls of felons, dead people, and epidemiologists… including his official challenge of the voter registration of Dr. Daniel Sosin — a commissioned member of the Public Health Service — currently serving at the CDC in Atlanta. A hearing will be held Friday before King County Elections Director Dean Logan, and TJ would “love to get Goldy or some other likeminded Seattleite to attend.”

Likeminded? I believe that those who know me best would be somewhat frightened at the prospect that there might be many other people with minds like mine, in Seattle or elsewhere… but if any of my readers would like to volunteer to play cub-reporter-for-a-day, please let me know.

I am occasionally fed a little dirt on the private lives of public officials and other local politirati. But while I’m not above a little name-calling and invective, exploiting personal tragedy just ain’t my schtick.

Thanks anyway, but I don’t particularly find the unsolicited tale of an adulterous affair between two legislators remotely amusing, and I’m not about to repeat the details here. Unless, of course — hypothetically — one of the unfaithful paramours were to make their infidelity relevant by, say… promoting some sort of bullshit “defense of marriage” act.

However a non-hypothetical example of relevant muckraking might be the widely reported arrest of Stephen Roach on charges of selling OxyContin to an undercover police informant. If it had been his mother, Sen. Pam Roach (R-Sumner), or his brother, Rep. Dan Roach (R-Bonney Lake) who had been caught on videotape snorting a crushed pill, I would take greater joy in piling on. But even though Stephen is not a politician himself, his mother’s reputation as a brash, law-and-order proponent provides more than enough relevance… as pointed out by OlyScoop in its typically thorough fashion.

Pam Roach is an outspoken supporter of gun rights… which I suppose helps explain why in addition to Oxy and pot, police found three guns in Stephen’s possession, including a loaded shotgun behind the headboard of his bed. More significantly, she is a frequent sponsor of tough-on-crime legislation; indeed, Pam and Dan are both sponsors of companion bills seeking to increase penalties for the making and selling of methamphetamine.

I have long believed that one of the major differences between liberals and conservatives, is that liberals don’t generally subscribe to the thesis that “bad things only happen to somebody else.” I can only assume that Pam’s strong support of tougher drug laws stems from deep, personal conviction… but now that her son faces a conviction of his own, perhaps she might start to temper her conservativism with a little compassion.

I sincerely wish that Stephen gets all the love, help and rehabilitation he needs. But now that her own son is about to lose his voting rights, as well as his freedom, I can only hope that Sen. Pam Roach reexamines her position on a “war on drugs” that has greatly contributed to disenfranchising 25 percent of Washington’s African-American males through felony convictions.

Well, apparently we must be making some progress in our efforts to pass a Property Tax Homestead Exemption, because this year there was actually some organized opposition against it. Various real estate and rental industry associations put in some effort to turn up before the House Finance Committee and testify against the bill. And of course, so did the Association of Washington Businesses (AWB).

The AWB is ideologically pure. They emphatically and consistently oppose raising taxes. On businesses. But they could care less about individual taxpayers, for the fact that property tax burden has been steadily shifting onto the backs of low-income homeowners is apparently okay by them. Suggest for a moment shifting some of the burden back to where it was just a few years ago, and apparently every business in the state will close up shop and move to Nevada. Blah, blah, blah.

The rhetoric of the other opponents was a bit more persuasive, if disingenuous. The fact is, a Property Tax Homestead Exemption would shift some taxes to rental properties. Opponents argued that we’re going to force low-income renters out on the streets. That’s a load of crap, but you can be sure I’ll be asking the Rental Housing Association to testify on behalf of the Low-Income Renter Tax Credit bill I plan to whip up. Then we’ll see how selfless their testimony really was.

I’m not necessarily confident that we have much of a chance of getting this bill through committee this year, but it gives us the opportunity to request more information from the Department of Revenue, and continue to make the argument for progressive property tax relief. The legislative process can be excruciatingly slow, and while it might be tempting to take Eyman-like shortcuts, I’m not stupid or arrogant enough to believe that I can sit down and write a piece of tax legislation all by myself without room for collaboration and improvement.

Besides, I kind of enjoy tilting at windmills. And there certainly is an awful lot of wind in Olympia.

[Want to help? Email the Finance Committee and ask them to send HB 1744 to the floor.]