Now that the election contest is over, so too are the heady days of bombarding the public with half-baked, uncorroborated tales of official misconduct and fraud. So everybody’s favorite right-wing, aluminum hat boy — our good friend Stefan — has taken to the more daunting task of sharing his personal paranoia and distrust… one voter at a time.
Lacking the actual names on the 96 ballots King County found uncounted in their absentee envelopes, Stefan has not only used his superior deductive powers to narrow the list down to 300 individuals… he’s started to personally notify them that their vote didn’t count. These are voters, according to Stefan, who with “reasonable certainty” were “apparently disenfranchised.” Voters like Wendy Stansbury.
Needless to say, she was upset by this news.
No kidding.
Of course, Stefan has earned a reputation for coming to conclusions that are not always grounded in the facts… like when he confidently predicted a Rossi victory just days before the ruling. But it’s an awesome responsibility to be the sole purveyor of the apparently reasonably certain truth, so if Wendy was needlessly upset, I suppose that’s just the price Stefan is willing to pay.
Pretty unoriginal; am i allowed to cut and paste and pretend its a story? Print the rest of his stuff, not the one clip that makes him look bad.
Righton @1,
Ooops. Forgot to include the link to the original post. Fixed it.
Goldy, I think Stefan’s methodology is fairly sound. It makes perfect sense. Might as well match up the names and figure out who was disenfranchised.
What a low-life. Stefan has no conscience, no brain, no common sense.
In case you guys did not catch it the judge CAREFULLY walked around saying that chrissy had more votes…..
Richard Pope @ 3
Isn’t Sharkansky a hypocrite here. I recall when the envelopes were discovered he stated they should remain sealed and shouldn’t be counted or used as evidence in the election contest. He was happy to speculate that those votes would have favored Rossi, but he didn’t want to risk actually having to find out. Just like the GOP strategy in their case in chief. They didn’t want to find out how those felons really voted. Now that those envelopes can’t hurt the GOP’s bogus case he’s happy to use them to stir up resentment.
In a nutshell: Stefan is right; Logic, facts, data, people who disagree are all wrong.
We feel obligated to take everything he says on faith.
You can not argue with him for it is fruitless to argue with one whose faith trumps all reason.
Did we miss something, when was that short shit given the responsibility of notifing anyone of anything? Who the hell does he think he is, and why does it matter any longer?
He must think that cause he gets invited to be on TV that he can self apoint these responsibilites to himself! If thats allowed (I know if he called me with this I’d have a few choice words for him!), can anyone use that excel doc to make cold calls from?
…and how’d he get 295 names from 96 uncounted ballots?? Must be that repukeican new math…
If Stefan rings my doorbell and tells me my vote didn’t count, can I smack him? Just asking.
Chew2 @ 6
And why not? Whether Rossi deserved to win or lose the election contest lawsuit is no longer the issue. The issue now is cleaning up King County Elections. I believe there is a race for King County Executive this fall — the person who appoints the head of King County Elections. These 96 ballots were not counted because of incredibly reckless malfeasance. King County Elections didn’t give a damn whether their numbers balanced, and therefore ignored all of the batch accounting slips whose numbers were off. Had King County Elections really cared, they would have spotted the missing ballots simply by seeing if the batch slips balanced. The individual voters who were screwed out of having their ballots counted should be identified, so that the victims of this problem are personified (just like Larry Phillips and the other 700 or so unverified absentee signature ballots were last fall).
DonSux/thatPrick/Priscilla/43others now toothFAIRY–
Gee, all you LEFTIST PINHEADS were so concerned about Disenfranchised Voters….now you have an opportunity to meet some real, honest to goodness disenfranchised voters but you marginalize and minimize.
Do you PINHEADS really think the AUTOPSY of this Election mess is actually over????
This will be dragging on for many months with plenty of new developments…
For example….awwwwwww, you PINHEADS figure it out if yer so schmart!
Chuck @ 5
“In case you guys did not catch it the judge CAREFULLY walked around saying that chrissy had more votes….. “
I am not sure what transcript you are reading, but I’ll give a few brief quotes from Judge Bridges oral decision that contradicts your silly statement:
Page 2 paragraph 1. “On December 30, Secretary of State Sam Reed announced the result of the manual recount and declared that Christine Gregoire was the winner of the 2004 gubernatorial election by a margin of 129 votes. . . . Ms. Gregoire received 1,373,361 votes. Mr. Rossi received 1,373,232 votes.”
That pretty much contradicts your statement. He amends the totals on page 9 paragraph 2, “The Court concludes, by clear and convincing evidence, that Mr. Rossi received four votes cast illegally by felons. . . . There is no evidence, however, in this record that Ms. Gregoire received any illegal votes.”
Hey, aren’t republicans all for accountability?
Why doesn’t Stefan hold himself accountable for all the errors he’s made?
Why don’t his supporters hold him accountable (much as they demand voters hold elected officials accountable)?
Just like supporters held Eyman accountable after he stole their money…
Mr Cynicals balls have finally dropped back out of his body cavity after the shock of the judges decision. Go wash your hands immediately, young man!
Gee, this is almost the sort of thing you’d want to have before the election contest. And also not in make believe land.
Also, I cold called people and told them that their votes didn’t count for President because it wasn’t the result I wanted. Needless to say they were pretty upset. They said things like “That’s unbelevable” and “Who the hell are you?” and “I was on the other line with my mother, and you called for that” and “I don’t know what the hell list I’m on but please take me off of it and smack the person who made it upside the head” and of course “The number you have dialed has been disconnected or is no longer in service. If you feel you have reached this recording in error, please hang up and try again.” Republicans are disconnecting people’s phones just so we can’t get at the truth.
Thom-Ass:
So much for your deep concern about disenfranchised voters, huh??
Predictable…
Oh well, this is only mud-wrestling after all.
Few people listen to others with opposing views.
They prefer “mud-wrestling”.
Thom-Ass does more than preach to the choir as he is yet another personna of the multi-identities of DonSux/thatPrick/Priscilla/Don/Alan/50 others
THOM-ASS preaches to the choir all right…and the choir is HIM!!!
Stefan, like all Reps, is willing to take all of the responsibility but none of the blame.
lucy–
I’ll admit I had to cough a few times to dislodge my oversized balls from my rather tight throat after that decision!!
It still echoes “I will stand by what Judge Bridges decides” cried all the neo-cons.
What a bunch of lying bastards.
Never trust them, never negotiate with them, never turn your back on them.
Round them up and send them to The Hague!
Cynical Idiot @ 11
You totally miss the point, which is that Stefan doesn’t know if his list is accurate, therefore has no business telling those people their votes didn’t count.
Mr. Cyn-Irr (who appearntly even lies about changing his name) @ 11 “Do you PINHEADS really think the AUTOPSY of this Election mess is actually over????
This will be dragging on for many months with plenty of new developments…
For example….awwwwwww, you PINHEADS figure it out if yer so schmart!”
Oh, Mr. Cyn-Irr. your history for prediction is a little cloudy. In fact it is dismal, and you are an immoral lying piece of shit.
Mr. Irrelevant Idiot @ 17
Where was all this concern of yours for disenfranchised voters when Jeb Bush and Kat Harri were doing their dirty work?
Richard Pope @ 10
“These 96 ballots were not counted because of incredibly reckless malfeasance. King County Elections didn’t give a damn whether their numbers balanced, and therefore ignored all of the batch accounting slips whose numbers were off.”
Pullleeeese, Richard, you are a respectable man. . . you shouldn’t be blogging on crack.
Indeed it was careless and unfortunate that KC misplaced 96 ballots (same goes for the 64 misplaced ballots in Pierce County and the 8 ballots in Spokane County), but “incredibly reckless malfeasance?” That is a little over the top, don’t you think?
I would counter you assertions by claiming that KC DID care very much about balancing the numbers. Unfortunately, as was made clear in the trial, they did not know how to use the software properly. Even if they did, it is not clear that anyone would realize that the ballots were mixed in with the opened envelopes (nor is it clear that they would have time to hunt them down).
In any case, my guess is that this particular error will not happen again in King, Pierce and Spokane Counties!
Irrelevant Cynical Idiot @ 18
Is that what you eat at Rossi fundraisers — spaghetti and meat balls? har har har
Were those meat balls hairy? har har har
Mr. Cynical @ 18
“I’ll admit I had to cough a few times to dislodge my oversized balls from my rather tight throat after that decision!!”
So, you are saying your balls were caught in a big bind…er, somp’en like that.
Stefan probably is going to be asked to work for the Central Intelligence Agency…
Unless he already is!
WOW, Mr. Cyn-irr can swallow his own balls?!?
I bet yur dog’s jelous!!
Knock Knock
Who’s there?
Stefan Minnow, Homeland Insecurity. I am here to help.
DJ @ 23
Okay, I was a little strong on that one. “Incredibly reckless malfeasance” may be overdoing it. But I think it was something more than ordinary negligence.
All that said, what do you think of Stefan’s methodology in determining certain uncounted voters and possible uncounted voters?
http://www.soundpolitics.com/a.....tml#004610
Richard @ 30: I don’t want to speak for dj, but I think Stefan’s methodology for determining 30 of the 96 uncounted voters is pretty good. I’m even willing to concede that the remaining 66 are likely to be found on his list of 272 possible uncounted voters.
Question for you: What do you think of Stefan’s insinuation that KingCo election workers carefully selected a handful of ballots from Republican voters (out of nearly 600,000 absentee ballots) in order to take them out of the count at a time when nobody had any idea how close the election would be?
I agree with Richard Pope and scottd that Stefan is doing a good job playing the amateur sleuth. (Although someone really should talk to him about his Excel spreadsheet fixation.) There’s always some uncertainty in connecting widely-spaced dots, but it seems likely that he has indeed figured out who some of the uncounted ballots belong to.
But this is the equivalent of closing the barn door after the horses are already gone. As Carl Ballard pointed out @ 15, “Gee, this is almost the sort of thing you’d want to have before the election contest” (emphasis added). Of course Rossi’s folks didn’t want to do that, because they figured that most of those excluded voters would be Gregoire supporters. So, as chew2 recalled @ 3, “when the envelopes were discovered he stated they should remain sealed and shouldn’t be counted or used as evidence in the election contest. He was happy to speculate that those votes would have favored Rossi, but he didn’t want to risk actually having to find out.”
Now that the Republicans’ case is officially toast, Stefan is using his data jockey powers to, as chew2 so succinctly put it, “stir up resentment.” Notice that the anecdote he provides features (of course!) an apparently-disenfranchised Republican. Horrors! There must be evil deeds and evil-doers involved. Never mind that odds are most of these 96 uncounted ballots came from Democrats and Gregoire supporters. scottd’s question @ 31 (2nd para.) is a pointed one. If Stefan is going to keep using pieced-together fragments of data to paint a sinister picture, I say King County ought to release the list and defuse the stupid speculation.
It’s too bad that the parties didn’t press Judge Bridges to have those valid-but-uncounted ballots opened and added to the vote totals, and that the Judge didn’t order it on his own. But it’s water under the bridge now; the election is definitively over and the vote totals are final, no matter how you feel about it. Stefan’s conspiracy theories and grudges are now officially pointless and petty. He should devote his energies to something more constructive. (And, methinks, I should devote my energies to something more constructive than critiquing him. Oh, well.)
Carl Ballard @ 15: LOL! Witty.
Scottd @ 31; yeah on one hand Shark’s suggestion about ballots sounds edgy and wrong, but heck, did you listen to those liars on TV, in trial? I mean, do you trust Logan? Why do you trust Logan? All he and his gang did was coverup and write missives about how great there work was. Yeesh, yechh.
Richard Pope @ 30
“All that said, what do you think of Stefan’s methodology in determining certain uncounted voters and possible uncounted voters?”
My understanding of the absentee ballot-handling procedure for KC is limited to reading stuff on blogs and listening to the trial. So, with that caveat, Sharkansky’s method seems reasonable as a first pass in identifying some of the people in the pool of unopened ballots. Even so, there are a number of sources of error that I can envision that will result in false mismatches, or a lack of mismatches when there should be some.
For example, I am not sure how accurate the counts are that go with batch numbers. I suspect there are some errors here that may be related to ballots being missed–e.g. I am thinking that some envelopes may have stuck together. Therefore pairs of envelopes may have been counted as a single envelope in the batch reports and were also missed during opening.
Some of the mismatches are bound to be data entry errors while entering batch counts. Likewise, there is the possibility that some of the mismatches are related to the records that Samantha Duncan messed up.
Also, I don’t when or if the “main absentee ballot file” that Sharkansky used was last updated.
My intuition is that he will only end up with 50% to 65% of the true casters of the unopened ballots in his list.
32
“It’s too bad that the parties didn’t press Judge Bridges to have those valid-but-uncounted ballots opened and added to the vote totals, and that the Judge didn’t order it on his own.”
I can’t speak for the R’s, but I’d guess for the D’s it was like a football game where you’re ahead by 5 touchdowns, at some point you stop piling humiliation on the opposing team because it’s inhumane to keep kicking their prostrate asses.
ScottD @ 31 DJ @ 35
Let’s see how close Stefan was to being correct. Too bad King County Elections doesn’t simply release the list right away, instead of waiting a few days to simply provide copies of the outer envelopes.
When does dean logan and duffus get fired
Righton:
The same day that the BIAW stops funding the minnow, and the GOP investigates the more ballots than voters at the King County CONvention.
Guess you didn’t understand my question. Once the tomfoolery was uncovered, we heard a lot of “we’ll fix all this”.
I dont’ see anything being done, AND I don’t trust the same gang that said all was ok in the past, to ever honestly fix things (pun intended).
Maybe they should let us pick the county to vote in; that way my vote would not be disenfranchised by the extral illegal votes
righton @ 40
Willful ignorance will get you nothing but ridicule, dude.
“Once the tomfoolery was uncovered, we heard a lot of “we’ll fix all this”. I dont’ see anything being done. . . .”
Then you have not been looking very hard, have you?
“Maybe they should let us pick the county to vote in; that way my vote would not be disenfranchised by the extral illegal votes”
You can do that for yourself by dragging your sorry ass to another county. But, be very careful where you go. There where only 4 or 5 counties in which no illegal votes were found. And those counties were probably not looked at very carefully.
dj; you are making this stuff up. They looked closely, KC didn’t. I think it would be great fun to say, “you know i really don’t trust you guys; i’ll vote w/ someone else”. Again just like banks, some folks trust banks out of town or out of state.
righton @ 42
“you are making this stuff up. They looked closely, KC didn’t.”
No, righton, I am not making it up.
In fact, my statement is based on the actual data. The four counties without any illegal votes (in Judge Bridges ruling) are Asotin, Pend_Oreille, San_Juan, and Wahkiakum. It is possible that Skamania should be added to the list.
Another fact for you (again, based on the actual data). If we consider the illegal votes accepted by Judge Bridges, King County does not have the highest error rate. There are four counties with more errors per ballot than KC: Benton, Yakima, Ferry, and Grant.
Doesnt bother you guys that Gregoir cannot even muster up more than 32% acceptance in the polls does it?
Chuck: To answer your question, Hell No. We got what we wanted:
1.) Rossi lost manual recount.
2.) Rossi lost in court.
3.) Gloating on the loss.
4.) No “real” care of the problems found.
5.) More Gloating.
6.) Call wascally Republicans thugs and other wonderful names
Any more
Pudster
Puddybud@45
Ah but 59% of the state STILL thinks Rossi won…that is 59% of a heavy democratic state. Doesnt it bother you what your governor might have done to your party? I think serious damage has beed done, so keep on gloating and I will enjoy watching democrats thrown out in elections upcoming.
Ah but 59% of the state STILL thinks Rossi won
When was that survey done?
If anyone reads any posts from that dispicable, lying, piece of shit Pudster “Wounded Knee” tell him I’ve responded to his post on the Shiavo Autopsy thread @ 269.
Thanks,
GBS