Well, I’m guessing some people are awfully disappointed by the latest round of numbers just released by King County Records & Elections in the District 1 Council race: Bob Ferguson now leads Carolyn Edmonds by 1070 votes, 13212 to 12142.
Of course, Edmonds and her supporters are disappointed. But even more disappointed are some righty provocateurs who had hoped beyond hope that this race might fall within the .5% margin that triggers an automatic recount… throwing a monkey wrench into KCRE’s operations, and creating fertile ground for rehashing old news about old elections.
Oh well. I guess we’ll all just have to settle for talking about the issues.
In order for this race to be close enough to test KCE’s bank-level accuracy, the margin would have to shrink to 0.33 votes. With a margin up around 1000 votes out of 13000 I am sure that even the dems will be satisfied that the winner exceeded the election error and that the winner actually got the most votes.
Yawn.
It is about time the vote counts were consistent for two counts in a row. Every other count, the lead among votes counted has been flipping significantly between Edmonds and Ferguson. But Ferguson had a healthy margin in the votes counted Saturday, and a healthy margin in the votes counted today.
Goldy,
I apologize for the hijack, but I thought you’d like to see this ASAP. As someone on the internets wrote, their reality has lapped our satire.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyo.....184830/683
Comment by Richard Pope— 9/26/05 @ 5:04 pm
Respectfully, the tally can change. Don’t worry, I’m not smoking a peace pipe!
Let me remind everyone that Goldy predicted an Edmonds victory.
Goldy is such a wonderful data analyst!
Goldy is also an engineer after studying the WSDOT AWV reports.
Is there any limit to what Goldy can do???
Josef @ 4
You may be right. It seems that the vast majority of recently received absentee ballots are coming from King County Council District One:
http://www.metrokc.gov/elections/abstats/
They allegedly received 318 absentee ballots in the mail on Fri 09/23/2005 and all 318 were from the City of Seattle! Moreover, none of them came from the District 8 portion of Seattle. And most interestingly, 203 of them came from District 1.
The statistical odds of this result are truly negligible. Almost looks like some sort of money business is going on here.
It is fairly easy to vote late in Washington and have your vote counted. One way which is very easy is to sign your ballot with the election date or an earlier date, and then mail the ballot from outside the State of Washington. Under RCW 29A.40.100(3), the alleged date of signature would control over the postmark date. Just so long as the ballot was received by certification day — which happens to be Fri 09/30/2005 for the primary election.
It wouldn’t be impossible for people who failed to timely vote in the primary to complete a ballot, backdate their signature, and send it to Portland, Oregon for mailing. Since mail only takes a couple of days to get here from Portland, this can still be done and can easily change the results.
Also, there are ways to backdate a postmark on an envelope. This would be illegal, but they wouldn’t detect it. If someone has a postage meter, they can do this. Especially certain mailers who deposit their mail directly with the post office (such as Mailboxes Etc and similar stores).
I am certainly not saying this is happening. But only 30,259 out of 71,979 District 1 absentee ballots have been returned to date. There is a lot of room for mischief among the other 41,000 voters who haven’t returned their absentee ballots yet.
You guys are missing the inside game on this one. See the link:
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/.....son26.html
I have one arguement with its content. A Ferguson win won’t bring a shift to the suburban/rural county. The Council size reduction leaves rural King Co with one representative- Kathy Lambert. Not exactly what a lot of folks had in mind when the advocated for it.
Comment by Richard Pope— 9/26/05 @ 5:51 pm
Good point. I smell fraud. I hope they get caught… again and Ferguson nails ’em on it. Better still – he buys a recount. Hey, I hear Reagan Dunn has some $$$ and shares my infinite loathing of Dean Logan.
Sorry Josef, they did not get caught in fraud. Sloppy procedures,many accusations, but no finding of fraud.
Cynical @5,
Hey, I don’t mind admitting when I wrong, but let’s just be honest here… in the same post I said it looked like Edmonds would win, I also said that such projections tend to be full of shit. And they were.
Comment by K— 9/26/05 @ 8:52 pm
My definition of fraud, supported by the facts.
Fraud, to me, isn’t just playing w/ tally #s themselves…
Goldy @ 10==
You are the Master at always throwing in a little wiggle-room in your “predictions”.
You want to be PERFECTLY HONEST Goldy?
Then you should have said that “it looks like Edmonds should win but GOLDY tends to be full of shit”…..not ALL PREDICTIONS.
Goodnight Goldy.
Mr. C @5 — it was a PREDICTION — yet you claim this has to do with data analyis. Geez…figure out some useful stuff to write on your short lines.
If it’s a recounts you want, the race for (qualifying) 2nd place in the primary for King County Sheriff is only a 32 vote edge, out of nearly 300,000 votes cast.
No ballots printed until that one is settled.
As long as the parties wanted their partisan primary, they should accept a mandate that their candidate be nominated with a majority of those who chose their ballots. Instant Runoff Voting should be used in both the Primary and the General. If the Top Two is upheld on appeal, and we adopted IRV in the interim, it could lead to saving us the need for the primary at all. The delay caused by this race, and the Non-Partisan King County Sherriff race, will delay printing the ballots for November, possibly setting us up for a mess in the General.