Forgive me for obsessing on the topic, but when our foils at the Seattle Times editorial board and our friend Joel Connelly at the Seattle P-I are both editorializing in favor of changing the voting deadline from postmarked on election day to received by election day, you just know there’s gonna be another legislative move afoot to do exactly that. And with the facts firmly on my side, I just can’t let this one go.
Both Joel and the Times complain that ballot counting in Washington state is too damn slow, and both point to first-in-the-nation all-vote-by-mail Oregon and its received by election day standard as a model for how to do these things right, so you might reasonably assume that Oregon counts its ballots considerably faster.
Well… not exactly.
It’s hard to do an apple to apple comparison, what with last Tuesday having been our first all vote by mail general election, while Oregon didn’t have a 2009 general election at all, but a quick look at King County Washington’s performance during 2009 versus Multnomah County Oregon in 2008 bears some mixed results.
Of the 366,948 ballots cast in Multnomah in November 2008, 133,908 were tallied and reported by the end of election night, or roughly 36.49%. Of the approximately 600,000 ballots projected to have been cast in King in November 2009, 254,261 were tallied and reported on election night, or roughly 42.4%.
That’s right… on election night, slow as a snail King reported a larger percentage of the total ballots than did supposedly speedy Multnomah.
From there on, Multnomah jumps out ahead, tallying 60.69% of the total ballots cast by Wednesday night, and 94.3% by Thursday, compared to a relatively paltry 51.4% and 62.9% respectively for King. But how much of this advantage was due to Multnomah having all the ballots in hand by 8pm Tuesday? Not much.
Unlike King, Multnomah elections appears to have labored around the clock during the first few days following the election, generating 29 reports between 7:41 PM Tuesday and 4:40 PM Thursday, and at all hours of the day and night. KCE, not so much, generating just three reports during its equivalent three day period, working what appears to be a daily, eight-hour shift. And it really does take Multnomah a three-day, round-the-clock effort to push its way through 94.3% of the ballots it has on hand.
So what if King were to invest in the same sort of effort?
Well, as it turns out, KCE reports a daily estimate of the uncounted ballots it has on hand, and when you add those to the daily totals, King could have conceivably tallied as much as 72.9% of ballots by Wednesday night, and 85.9% by the end of the day Thursday. And by Friday night, when Multnomah had tallied 95.7 of its ballots, King already had 94.1% of projected ballots either tallied or on hand.
Thus it isn’t a lack of ballots that slows the counting process in King, but rather the lack of sufficient manpower and infrastructure to count them as the ballots come in. Indeed, moving the ballot deadline without dramatically increasing KCE resources would not have sped up the tallying process at all, as KCE barely got through the election day ballots on hand by the end of Friday’s first shift.
The point is, tallying mail in ballots takes time — much more time than polling place voting machines, which tally the ballots as they are cast — and given the rules that govern our elections, no all mail-in election is going to produce the near-complete election night totals we see from other states. And that is what the Oregon example really proves.
I like it that it takes so long to count mail-in ballots. I’m sick of our national elections where the East Coast talking heads are talking about who won before I get a chance to go to the polls and vote. Mailing in ballots ought to be the only way we vote now. No more of these newsies influencing national elections with their exit polls. Let election night be free of these pompous asses and their pontifications.
Thank you for this important information.
They need more people counting on more shifts. The Times and Joel didn’t really do good reporting. It’s good to learn from the other states after we understand their whole process. Otherwise, it’s like inventing the same process 50 times. It’s called best practices in business.
I had to laugh at Joel’s column when he asserted that every other state knows their results the night of the election. Yeah, like the people of Minnesota knew who their senator was last year. Oops, guess it was this year they finally figured it out. Believe that one went on longer than Gregoire/Rossi in 2004. Let’s face it. A close election is a close election, and I want the ballots counted carefully and deliberately. And Joel needs something to bitch about. I was gonna post this on Joel’s column, but they limit the number of characters in your screen name, and mine is kinda long.
You can bet that the people complaining about how long it is taking to get the vote counted would be the first ones to complain about the extra cost if a bunch of temps were brought in to prep the ballots on hand Sunday and Monday and then run the counting machines all night on election night. With the County running a big deficit and scratching for ways to cut costs bringing in temps just isn’t in the cards. Perhaps the Seattle Times, Joel Connelly and Chris Gregoire would like to front the expense for the County personally.
Well what this tells me Goldy and fellow readers, is we have a hell of a job ahead of us. We must gather up our friends and fellow activists and write, call our state legislators, the Governor, and appear at hearings if we are going to stop this.
Governor Gregoire came out today supporting Republican Secretary of State Sam Reed. She whined about how the counting takes “days or weeks” and how “[t]hose candidates deserve to know. The people deserve to know.”
Well, I am a “people” and I do know, and it took a little less than a week to know. So what? I don’t mind. A week is not too long. And in most races, the spread was great enough that we knew election night. So what are these politicians whining about?
It is clear the power structure wants this.
We must stop this. I am tired of election officials’ and candidates’ cavalier attitude about the rights of voters. It is always all about them.
@ 1
I understand your frustration however I just have to say this about exit polls. Exit polls are a method of providing a check and balance to reported election results. They are used as a red flag to indicate that election results may have been tampered. With all vote by mail we have eliminated this (among other) important checks and balances.
I haven’t really thought about this subject before, but I would argue for a “postmarked by Monday or manually dropped off by Tuesday” rule. I would hope that if we did that, then a super-majority of ballots could be counted by Wednesday night.
Goldy,
Let us know when the legislature tries to tamper with this. I will go down to Olympia and testify against it.
@7 Exit polls are totally useless for the purpose of proving election fraud, because courts won’t accept them as evidence of how people actually voted, nor should they. For one thing, Republicans will lie through their teeth to pollsters about who they voted for, because they don’t want anyone to know they’re Nazis oops I mean Republicans.
@8 “then a super-majority of ballots could be counted by Wednesday night”
Why do they have to be counted by Wednesday night?
This isn’t a good comparison because on that particular election night Multnomah County elections had a flood in their basement where the counting is done, which slowed the process.
Screw fast. Let’s worry about accurate.
Ten @12,
Um… did you click through your own link?
But regardless, my main point stands, that it isn’t a lack of ballots that slows counting, but rather a lack of ballot counting capacity.
I like vote by mail just the way it is. I would rather have the election be right, than be fast. I would rather have every vote counted, then have a “final” number for the 9 pm news on election night with a large number of votes disenfranchised by traffic or weather.
I would rather have a fair democracy, what does the Joel and the Times want by contrast?
Like I said before, the politicians, staff, campaign volunteers, and news media all want to have their election-night parties where one candidate conceeds and the other claims victory. This allows the politicians and campaign staff to have a big celebration and go home and rest (or lick their wounds), and then start fresh again a day later. For the news media, it’s a way to keep people glued to the TV sets until late in the night, when otherwise they would be either be in bed or watching old movies on cable.
The rest of us really don’t care whether it can be done in a day or a week, or even longer. Personally, I’d rather have the ballots come in and be processed over several days so the staff is not rushed and it can be done without paying excess overtime to election department workers.
Now, if it really was important to have the results by election eve, the election staff could have already processed the ballots they had received up to election day, and waited to drop the results until the end of election day. Then on election day the staff would only have to process the ballots mailed on Saturday and Monday which are arriving on Tuesday. Those arriving on Wednesday and Thursday probably wouldn’t be enough to change the result, even in relatively close races. But that’s a very dangerous proposition – nobody is willing to trust that the totals wouldn’t get leaked out early, and might influence the later vote.
Good post and research. There is no reason to dienfranchise voters and spend more money just to have results a day or two earlier.
Actually I think it helps that some elections don’t get decided right away. It reminds voters that some elections are too close to call on election night and that every vote counts.
Goldy @ 14
I don’t quite agree. Preparing ballots for tabulation is the bottleneck. Tasks like envelope opening, signature comparison, correcting for voter intent. Actually scanning/counting the ballots is comparatively fast.
I don’t know if I’ve said this clearly enough: KCE works their tails off. Until I’m shown otherwise, I’d assume every ballot ready to count on election day gets counted.
I feel a bit defensive when people suggest KCE should have shifts working around the clock.
First, they’re already working hard.
Secondly, we really don’t want tired, overworked people counting votes.
Thirdly, and this is important, adding more shifts or working harder won’t get us earlier results.
At times like these, I feel that election administrators should do a better job of explaining how all this works. I’m looking at you Sam Reed. A little bit of clarity would go a long way. Of course, if Reed explained this stuff better, we’d see his proposals are worse than wrong.
Steve @ 17
Great insight. Very positive. Anything that encourages people to vote is a win.
@11 It’s just a reasonable amount of time. It always seems like a majority of elections can be called on election night. But for the few that can’t be called that quickly, only one day of delay is better than a week.