Goldy votes at the King County accessible voting center in Tukwila
The Seattle Times’ Bruce Ramsey thinks “lazy people” shouldn’t vote:
For the past 30 years I voted at a neighborhood church. As years went on, more people I knew were voting absentee, though they weren’t absent from the city. They were just absent from the polling station.
Lazy people. I thought it was a bad idea to make it easy for lazy people to vote.
Right. And it’s urban liberals like me who are accused of being elitist.
Like Ramsey, I too prefer the communal experience of going to the polls over the private clerical task of filling out and mailing in an absentee bailout. So much so, that I chose to drive down to King County’s “accessible voting center” in Tukwila today, to check out the touch screen voting machines, and cast my ballot in person. The service was fast and friendly, and I found the printed receipt reassuring, though the machines were considerably less intuitive than a paper ballot. During my ten minutes there I saw two elderly voters ask for help.
But that’s neither here nor there. The point is, if Ramsey is such a dedicated poll voter, he too could have chosen to back up his words with action, and vote in person. But I guess he was too busy. Or lazy. Or whatever.
Still, it’s not really for me to judge Ramsey’s preferred method of voting, and certainly not for me to suggest that it’s a bad idea to let people like him vote, just because they’re unwilling or unable to put the same amount of effort into the process as I do.
I’m just sayin’….
Goldy,
Just like a liberal to want a FREE GOVERNMENT HANDOUTS for accessible voting!!!! Get and job so you can afford to put a stamp on your ballot, ya lazy fuck! It’s liberals like you that waste trillions of dollars a year on programs like accessible voting, water distribution systems, and air traffic control infrastructure!
Years ago, I worked for a company that has a major local presence. Let’s call it The Boring Company (name changed to protect the innocent). The day before presidential election day, my boss decides that I should leave that evening for southern California. If I went, it of course meant that I wouldn’t get to vote because there was no time to sign up for an absentee ballot. So I refused to go. My boss was stunned that I refused to go because of some inconsequential matter such as voting in the presidential election. I was forever marked with the label of someone who didn’t like to travel. I am unaware of any overt blowback from this decision (other than never being asked to travel again), but I doubt that it did my career any good.
The whole episode left a bad taste in my mouth, so I wrote an email of complaint to the president of the company, Bill Conduit (name again changed to protect the innocent). He didn’t write back, but an assistant did. Broadly paraphrasing the reply, it in essence said that Boring encourages it employees to vote, but business is business.
I’ve always voted by absentee ballot since then and consider anyone who disses absentee balloting to be a complete fool.
@1
Great one Darryl.
I wonder if Bruce’s neighbors think as highly of him as he does of them.
Forget about Voting, How about being able to speak?
Gman @ 5,
Bruce is lazy, not dumb. I think he should be able to speak.
Holy smokes, Goldy, you trust that electronic voting machine? It was made by a Republican company, you know! It probably changed your Dow vote to a Suzie vote.
I suppose it never occurred to Ramsey that some people vote absentee because they start work at 6 a.m. and get off work at 7 p.m. …
… my personal lawyer, for example. He’s always in the office by 6:30 a.m. and rarely leaves before 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. and has been doing this for 30 years. His dedication to his clients is unbelievable — that’s why I chose him to be my lawyer.
@2 I usually change names to protect the guilty, because after 35 years as a lawyer, I’ve concluded nobody is innocent.
I’m really not comfortable with this absentee voting situation either. Electronic voting can work, as long as one has a printed “paper trail”. But with universal absentee ballots, no one ever has any guarantee their vote even gets submitted, let alone counted. I’ve never been comfortable with the way the State legislature just took it upon itself to decide how the voters of the state would vote, rather than allowing the voters to decide the matter for themselves.
I wonder if it’s possible to launch a referendum rolling back the universal absentee system to a more poll-based system. Voting, it seems, is too important to be left in control of the politicians.
Hi Goldy.
That “printed receipt” is the voter verified paper audit trail, or VVPAT for short. Without getting into it too much: 1) voters don’t actually verify and 2) the VVPAT is unreliable. (Per the studies, google for relevant links. Or I can dig ’em up if anyone cares anymore.)
A receipt is something you could take with you. That’d be bad. Violates voter privacy, enables vote buying, etc.
If you observe how the VVPAT is “audited” after the election, you’d be less reassured.
The “accessible” voting machines aren’t. John Gideon (RIP) and Ellen Theisen of Voters Unite have covered this exhaustively. (Again, per the studies. And my own observation.)
I could almost accept with the Diebold AccuVote touchscreens if they benefited voters somehow. But they don’t.
Cheers, Jason
Hi Goldy.
Is King County Elections using electronic poll books yet? Or did you sign on a printed poll book?
Sadly, I haven’t kept up. Day job and all that.
Cheers, Jason
Hi Goldy.
Bruce Ramsey is right, but for the wrong reasons. There’s nothing lazy about mail balloting. Not having mail balloting would disenfranchise voters. So it remain an important option.
On the issue of mail balloting (vote by mail), I’ve had a complete change of heart. I don’t think I’ve told many people yet. I’ll try to keep this brief.
The academics have concluded that auditing elections is mostly impractical, huge expensive, not very reassuring, and in some cases remains illegal. Therefore, I will no longer advocate for election audits.
But we still need the ability to verify our elections.
I now support Washington State Senator Eric Oemig’s proposal to post images of mail ballots online.
I had previously opposed this idea because it violates voter privacy.
However, by merely using a mail ballot, voter privacy is already forfeited. And elections administrators cannot (feasibly) take the necessary measures to better protect privacy (sort mail ballots by precinct before batching them).
Since it’s not possible to protect voter privacy with mail ballot processing, I’ve decided that we should simply stop pretending.
FYI, Humboldt County (Calif) has posted their mail ballot images online. This enabled a third party to find a nasty bug in the Diebold central count software where votes would lost. (I think Diebold may have even known about the bug, but didn’t think it important enough to tell anyone.)
As you may recall, King County Elections has all new software and hardware, the first customer in the nation. Pretty much the only way to validate our new system is to have an independent count.
Kind of like how Pierce County posted the raw data for the IRV election, which third parties used to verify the election.
Was that brief? No? About about brief enough?
Cheers, Jason
@11 “I wonder if it’s possible to launch a referendum rolling back the universal absentee system to a more poll-based system.”
If you do, make sure it includes a tax increase to pay the extra costs of maintaining two parallel voting systems, because the counties can’t afford this.
Cost was probably the main reason the legislature went to mail in voting.
Goldy, not wanting to step on your snark, but are you seriously trying to say that going out to vote does you good?
I quit voting in 1980 when Bozo the clown’s buddy was elected freaking President. Voted for Perot in 1992, when the poll workers freaked out when I unfolded the ballot, marked Perot, folded it back up and stuffed it in the ballot box, them “You’re supposed to go in the booth.” Me – “why, I’m not ashamed of who I voted for?”
Any time you have a vote that has less than 10 percent between win and lose, you have only voted for the choice of which evil is less.
King County is using brand new Diebold (now Premier soon to be ES&S) ballot scanners. These scanners were not properly recording votes in the August Primary election. Here is an excerpt from an article that appeared in the Queen Anne news.
“A few days into processing ballots for the August Primary, a King County Elections worker compared an actual ballot to its scanned image and noticed that a vote, clearly visible on the ballot, was not shown on the scanned image.
As election workers began exploring what went wrong, two problems emerged. First it was found that the scanners could not read ovals that were lightly filled or not completely filled in. Then it was discovered that minuscule amounts of ink and debris were being scrubbed off as ballots passed over the scanner. This debris would build up until the scanner could no longer see the votes under the line of built-up ink, even though the build-up not visible to the eye.
Department officials decided to zero out, or erase, all data collected to that point and re-scan all ballots. They ordered more frequent equipment cleanings and operators were told to look at scanned images at the end of each batch in hopes of catching problems…Observers from both the Democrats and Republicans on the scene agreed that a large turnout, such as that of last November, would be difficult for the Elections Department to handle until faults in the new equipment are corrected.”
I recently heard from an insider that KCE intends to relax the remedial procedures implemented in the Primary due to time constraints. Once again, KCE is never a confidence builder.
Here is the link to the QA article.
http://queenannenews.com/main......=71490.61/
No doubt Bruce is also disinclined to have much sympathy for those too poor to pay for the privilege of voting….because to be poor to to reveal oneself as lazy, and the only reason keeping him from espousing this openly is the fact that a poll tax is illegal.
He supports Workhouses, too. Really.
Goldy, I couldn’t agree more.
Now, let me be the first to say: It is officially time to retire the tired tag phrase: “I’m just sayin’…”
It’s faux folksiness is as annoying as W’s. And what does it really mean? That what I’m saying might offend, and I’m sorry for that, but it’s just busting out of me anyway. See various episodes of “Our Gang” for more data on this state of mind.
And please don’t tell me it’s used ironically. I know irony.
Whew. Got that off my chest.
Goldy,
You should consider doing something about your hair loss: it makes you look like you’re 65 or older! Have you thought about hair transplants?
7 We have to counter the tens of thousands of fraudulent acorn voters somehow.
If you’re too dumb, stupid or lazy to vote in person, you’re vote probably isn’t worth much anyway.
This is how I explain this state’s political leadership. Way too many stupid people voting.
Is this the line for kicking Bruce Ramsey in the nuts?
I have always thought that Election Day should be a national holiday, cold weather cook-outs, pick-nicks, like 4th of July, only the result of the 4th of July.
I see this day as a positive, it should be celebrated.
So, Bruce finds a way to find a way to look for a downside to election day (small caps for a small minded Ramsey).
Keep looking down, Bruce, if it is ever a national holiday, I hope that dunce, Ryan, makes you work that day. You deserve it, dumbshit.
I, myself, hate this vote by mail. I am just waiting for the election when I do not get my ballot. It happened in 1996, even though most in King county Goverment including the newly elected King County Executive for the city of Seattle Dow Constitine think I am lying. The only way for me to be 100% sure that my vote counts is to go to a polling place, sign in, prove who I am and vote.
Empty @ 22
Why do you hate our troops?
Absentee voting was invented to allow military personnel to vote.
Three of my siblings served. I’m pissed off that you don’t think they have the right to vote. They bleed for you, and this is your gratitude.
Roger Rabbit @ 15
To their credit, King County Elections stopped making the claim that vote by mail was less expensive once we debunked that claim.
Only the imbeciles at the vote by mail project still make the savings claim.
You mentioned the “hybrid” system. King County traded one hybrid system for another. We still have voting centers, sporting the notorious touchscreens.
Poll balloting is a logistic challenge, but otherwise straightforward. Mail balloting is an error prone, insecure system. There’s a flowchart on the wall at King County Elections showing all the steps in mail ballot processing. It’s not pretty.
At the polls, everything’s pretty clear. Show your id, sign the poll book, get a ballot, do your thing, shove that ballot into the box. If there’s a problem reading your ballot, you get another ballot.
With mail balloting, there’s lots of gray, with too many judgment calls. Does your signature match? Let’s ask the computer. Ah, no; hopefully you’ll confirm in time for your votes to be counted. Didn’t get a ballot? Maybe you can get another one. Made a mistake voting? Hmmm, let’s refer to the Voter Intent guide to see how your votes should be counted.
With mail ballots, there are over 20 different codes used to denote why your vote wasn’t counted.
With poll voting, the only reasons your vote isn’t counted is if you didn’t show up or you’re not registered. (You could also leave without shoving your ballot into the box. So that’s technically three reasons.)
verifiable election @ 17
King County Elections did a fine job in 2008.
The prior plan was to use all that new Diebold gear in 2008. A bunch of us managed to postpone the rollout until this year. Our core argument was “Dear God, please, don’t play around during a presidential election!”
We got a lot of heat for our opposition, made plenty of enemies.
Well, we were right. The testing this year showed the system wasn’t ready. We prevented an election meltdown.
I half suspect that King County Elections knew at some level that changing things in 2008 was a bad idea, but that mighty forces were at play.
There’s a nationwide push to vote by mail. Now that those touchscreens are being scrapped (everywhere but here), the vendors see an opportunity to cash in, yet again. “We promise these new systems are more reliable. We mean it this time! Just sign here.”
Even more crazy, there’s an even better financed push to internet voting. That lobby campaign started in 2008. The messaging is fantastic, if even more fact-free: do it for the troops.
Our very own Secretary of State is leading the charge. He wisely didn’t mention Internet voting during the campaign. The legislature’s call center was crushed by people opposing it.
But the vendors have a true friend indeed in Sam Reed. And some legislators are only too happy to rubber stamp anything that comes from Reed’s office, the last “good Republican”.
The fight for verifiable elections isn’t even close to done. The worst is yet to come.
Darryl @ 1
Finally, the details of the Republican electorial strategy to regain control emerge. (Looks just like the old strategy.)
Empty Suit doesn’t support the right to vote for our troops, the disabled, college students, or anyone out of town.
Mr Cynical wants to charge a poll tax.
pudge thinks there should be even more barriers to voter registration for the great unwashed.
All we need now, for the win, is Marvin or Puddy to suggest a literacy test prior to voting.
Mathew @ 24
1% of all first class mail (USPS) is lost in transit.
I’m sorry it happened to you.
Lost is different from undeliverable as addressed (UAA). (I don’t have stats for that. FOIA doesn’t apply to the USPS.)