HorsesAss.Org

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

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.]

I’m off to Olympia today to testify before the House Finance Committee on behalf of HB 1744, the Property Tax Homestead Exemption. If any of you happen to be wondering the halls of the John L. O’Brien Building at 1:30 PM, stop by Hearing Room C and say hello.

I’ll post a report later this evening.

Thanks to Washington State Political Report for pointing me towards a press release from state Sen. Margarita Prentice (D-Renton), announcing proposed legislation to impose a 10 percent tax on the state’s 125 commercial mini-casinos. SB 5287 would generate about $20 million a year for the general fund.

Prentice is also the prime sponsor of SB 5037, the Senate version of a House bill that purports to establish permanent funding for problem gambling treatment and prevention programs. Unfortunately, the bill would appropriate less than $600,000 a year, an amount Jennifer McCausland of Second Chance Washington calls “grossly inadequate.”

As I mentioned last week (“Scratch this! Lottery plans for big expansion“), neighboring Oregon, with a population half the size of Washington, dedicates 1 percent of lottery revenues to treatment and prevention programs… about $3.9 million annually. McCausland has advocated spending at least that much on Washington’s epidemic of problem gambling, and recently presented a proposal to Governor Gregoire’s office that would start off by appropriating $2 million a year of lottery revenues.

But wait… if we took 10 percent of the $20 million in revenues generated from SB 5287, and combined it with an additional $2 million from the lottery… we could fully fund SB 5037 to the tune of $4 million a year. It’s so crazy, it just might work!

According to a 1998 study, problem gambling already cost the state over $70 million a year, and the industry has doubled since then. It’s time the industry starts chipping in to clean up the public health mess it has helped to create.

[NOTE: It’s nearly impossible to post a comment about gambling without getting trapped in my blog spam filter… so please be patient if your comments are held for approval.]

The other day I posted a link to Carla and TorridJoe’s analysis of comparative “discrepancy” rates. They have posted a correction regarding Spokane County. (It doesn’t really change the conclusion.)

As a blogger, I have no obligation to be fair. But I choose to be so anyway.

Last year, not satisfied with simply opposing Tim Eyman’s stupid-ass initiatives, I decided it was time to make some constructive proposals of my own. And so I sat down with Steve Zemke of Taxpayers for Washington’s Future to explore creative alternatives for providing real tax relief to those families who needed it most, without exacerbating our state and local governments’ growing fiscal crisis.

After much research and deliberation, we settled upon a relatively simple proposal, a Property Tax Homestead Exemption, similar to that offered in 37 other states. Rep. Sharon Tomiko Santos (D-37) was quick to embrace the proposal; a bill was soon drafted, and introduced as HB 3076.

Although last year’s bill died in committee during a short session, Rep. Santos has reintroduced the bill this year as HB 1744, with bipartisan support. The bill is scheduled for a hearing before the House Finance Committee, Wednesday Feb 16, at 1:30 PM… and I’m hoping many of you will join me in voicing your support.

HB 1744 exempts from all local property taxes a portion of your primary residence equal to 20% of your county’s median property value. Additionally, it exempts from the state property tax a portion equal to 20% of the state’s median property value.

The result is substantial property tax relief targeted at middle- and low income homeowners, while remaining absolutely revenue neutral.

How substantial? Well, last year the Department of Revenue estimated the following average savings based on a flat $30,000 exemption:

CY 2005		Number of		Average		Average		Percent
Assessed Value		Homeowners		Property Tax		Relief		Relief
< $50,000		97,433		$331		$267		81%
$50,000-$100,000		201,473		$993		$312		31%
$100,000 – $150,000		313,395		$1,650		$270		16%
$150,000 – $200,000		307,384		$2,255		$221		10%
$200,000 – $250,000		265,383		$2,772		$168		6%
$250,000 – $300,000		153,709		$3,383		$119		4%
$300,000 – $400,000		187,325		$4,144		$59		1%
$400,000 – $500,000		76,746		$5,179		-$13		0%
> $500,000		80,761		$9,191		-$326		-4%
All Homeowners		1,683,609		$2,741		$171		6%

As you can see, the vast majority of homeowners would pay lower taxes, with only a 4% increase on homes over $500,000. Note that since the actual bill adjusts the exemption to county median values, the break-even point shifts to a higher property value in higher valued counties. And since 82% of wealthy homeowners itemize their federal tax returns, their net tax increase is substantially reduced by their federal tax offset.

While home value and household income do not necessarily correlate, they tend to on average. And thus a Homestead Exemption would target tax relief to those homeowners who need it most.

To achieve this desperately needed property tax relief, HB 1744 modestly shifts tax burden from low value property to high value property, and from homes to non-residential property. This shift only partially corrects a trend that has been moving in the other direction over the past 20 years, and still leaves Washington with the most regressive tax structure in the nation (although it brings us much closer to number two, Florida… which happens to have a Property Tax Homestead Exemption of its own.)

A more detailed FAQ is available on TaxSanity.org, and from the Permanent Defense Homestead Exemption Center. You can also read the full text of the bill and the House bill analysis, from the Legislature’s website.

Steve and I, along with Andrew Villeneuve of Permanent Defense will be down in Olympia tomorrow, testifying at the hearing (1:30 PM, House Hearing Rm C, John L. O’Brien Building.) We hope some of you can make it.

And we urge all of you who support further debate on this bill to contact the members of the House Finance Committee and ask them to send the bill to the floor. Click here to send an email to the Committee members.

If you have any questions, please leave them in the comment thread, and I will answer them as best I can.

Part I of this exciting series on today’s plodding King County Council meeting can be summed up as follows: the military ballots went out on time, ballots were enhanced legally, and yes, some ineligible felons voted, but no it wasn’t due to corruption or negligence on the part of elections workers.

(Hmmm… perhaps Part I was a bit verbose?)

In this installment I will address the 348 improperly scanned provisional ballots, the 735 “no signature on file” ballots, and the incredibly overblown issue of the so-called “discrepancy.”

Provisional Ballots

As has been widely reported, KC Elections determined that 348 provisional ballots had been improperly scanned into the AccuVote machines at the polling places, before they had been properly canvassed to see if they were legal votes. Of these, 341 have been traced to specific voters, and 252 are confirmed to have been cast by valid, registered voters.

The proper procedure is that you sign a poll book, fill out a ballot, place it inside an envelope, complete the envelope, and deposit it in the slot in the side of the AccuVote machine. Once back at the counting center, election workers verify the envelopes, just like an absentee, before adding the ballot to the count, or rejecting it.

KC elections was able to determine who cast most of these polling-place-scanned provisional ballots by comparing the poll books with the provisional envelopes received from the polling place; those who signed the poll book but for whom there are no envelopes are assumed to have fed their ballot directly into the machine.

It should be noted that they cannot directly associate a specific ballot to a specific voter (secret ballot and all that), and just because a ballot has not been confirmed to have been valid, doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t. But it is clear that we have as many as 96 provisional ballots in KC that might not have been counted, had they been caste properly… and there is no way to sort them out of the mix.

Can we attribute this to election worker or administrative error? I don’t see how not. While nearly 99 percent of the over 31,000 provisional ballots were cast properly, this is an error for which there is an easy technical solution. In fact, it is so easy, that KC just implemented it in last week’s special levy election: provisional ballots had stickers placed over their barcode so that they could not be scanned at the polling place. Well, duh-uh! I suggest that a more secure solution would be to print provisional ballots with different barcodes, so as to avoid potential tampering with stickers.

Councilmember Steve “The Executioner” Hammond, believes the only way to restore public faith in elections is for “heads to roll,” but as Councilmember Julia Patterson pointed out, King County Elections only has 43 full-time employees… the polls are actually staffed by over 4000 part-time volunteers (they get nominal pay for a 12-hour day), “average citizens who come forth to engage in the democratic process.” These are the “grandmothers” that some council members talked of, and Patterson warned that talk of “heads rolling” would discourage engagement.

Personally, I’m well familiar with these grandmotherly poll workers. My South Seattle polling place has been staffed by the same table of little old ladies since I started voting there seven years ago. If Hammond is patient, I’m sure many of their heads will fall off on their own in short time.

Anyway… while it may not be satisfying to say that “mistakes were made,” and leave it at that, mistakes were made by poll workers — with about one percent of provisional ballots — and now KC Elections has devised a procedure to prevent such mistakes in the future. Problem solved.

As to what this means to Rossi’s contest, well, I’m not sure it means all that much. Remember, in addition to the grandmas, the polls were watched by observers from both parties, including an army of attorneys. If there have been any reports of massive election day fraud regarding provisional ballots, I haven’t heard it. Rossi can’t prove who the 96 ballots were cast for… at the very best, maybe a judge might value average them, taking away about 18 votes from Gregoire’s margin. But I doubt the courts would even go that far.

The 735 No-Signature-On-File Ballots

Isn’t it curious that of all the errors supposedly committed by incompetent KC election workers, the Republicans never mention this one? 735 absentee ballots were improperly left out of the first two counts because signatures had not been scanned into the computer for those voters. After these votes were discovered, the canvassing board verified and counted 566 of them (backed up by a unanimous Supreme Court decision.)

Keep this in mind… part of the Republican mantra (stupid as it may be) is that Rossi “won” two out of three counts. But if these ballots had been properly canvassed the first time around, Gregoire would have won the machine recount… leaving Rossi to pay for a hand recount. As Councilmember Raymond Shaw Reagan Dunn profoundly pointed out, “perception is reality.” Imagine how different public perception of this election might be if Gregoire had “won two out of three” counts?

In any case I didn’t hear Hammond asking for heads to roll over this one.

And finally… “The Discrepancy”

What a load of shit.

I was talking to a reporter before the meeting, and he said I had to admit, that intuitively, it looked suspicious. And I did have to admit it… intuitively it does. But only if you don’t understand any of the underlying facts. In fact this “controversy” is based on a false assumption that these two lists were ever intended to reconcile with one another.

To put this in the proper perspective, Councilmember David Irons (hmmm… what’s he running for?) repeated his “recollection” that the 2000 discrepancy at certification was only 17 as “confirmation” that the 2004 number is out of whack. When asked about this after the meeting, Dean Logan questioned what Irons might have been recalling, considering the fact that the voter list isn’t compiled until after certification. (And I’m totally ignoring the bizarre notion that Iron’s 4-year-old “recollection” is more accurate than the actual numbers recorded on file.)

Remember the cries from the right that it was criminally irresponsible to certify this election if the voter list didn’t reconcile with the ballots cast? Kind of hard to make that a condition of certification when the crediting of voters doesn’t occur until afterwards, huh? As Logan made absolutely clear, there is “no legal reconciliation process,” an assertion that has been repeated to me by every auditor’s office I have talked to. The voter list is compiled out of an entirely different process than the count of ballots cast, and for entirely different purposes.

In addition to recording about 600,000 absentee voters, the list is compiled by hand scanning the barcode next to each signed line of over 2600 poll books. If KC Elections could fail to scan the signatures from 735 registration cards, imagine what kind of human error a hand-held scanner introduces into the process. 1,800 misscanned voters is not only understandable, it’s completely consistent with past elections and other jurisdictions. So there.

I don’t really want to expend many more pixels on this issue, as really, it is a legal non-issue… however much the public may have swallowed the righties’ propaganda. But the ever earnest Councilmember Bob Ferguson spent some time trying tease out of Logan that if one precinct had 10 extra voters and another had 10 extra ballots, then that should be a net discrepancy of 20, not zero. (The Snark nodded his head hungrily at this, so I’m sure we’ll be hearing this thesis from the dark side.) But Logan wouldn’t bite, as it ignores a fundamental aspect of voter accreditation.

Over 28,000 provision ballots were counted. And for each one, the ballot was counted in the precinct in which it was cast, where as the voter was credited for voting in the precinct in which he is registered. But if Ferguson’s logic is followed, these 28,000 provisional ballots would create a 56,000 vote discrepancy on their own!

That’s what happens when you try reconcile apples with oranges.

Ah well… I’ve run off at the fingers again. I’ve got a few more observations and comments to make, but I guess I’ll have to save them for Part III.

Before the start of today’s King County Council Meeting, I shook hands with Stefan… and the universe didn’t explode. So I guess us bloggers are just ordinary folk after all.

Anyway….

I didn’t really expect there to be much news generated at this meeting, as it mostly consisted of KC Elections Director Dean Logan presenting his previously released report on the November election. But there actually were a couple issues he cleared up. (At least in my mind… maybe not in the minds of some of the slower councilfolk.)

Military & Overseas Ballots

According to Logan these ballots are one and the same, and they are all mailed in postage paid envelopes provided by the federal government. Thus there is no bulk mail account or third-party mailing house with records to check. They were delivered directly to the post office, by the Oct. 8 deadline… and an internal department log confirms this.

This seemed perfectly clear to me and other members of the audience, but not apparently to Councilmember Kathy Lambert, who followed up by asking Logan if he was aware that the mailing house didn’t send these out until Oct. 13. Um… KC didn’t use a mailing house for these ballots, and Logan repeated that they were mailed out on Oct. 8. Additional military & overseas ballots went out as requests came in.

So as expected, this is a non-issue.

Ballot Enhancement

There have been conflicting reports as to the process by which ballots were enhanced. Some reports say election workers used redacting tape, and then marked over the tape. Some reports claim workers marked the ballots directly. It turns out, both are true.

In cases where the worker could fill in the oval without obscuring the original mark, the ballot was enhanced directly… for example, where the voter circled the oval, and the election worker filled it in. Logan showed a slide illustrating just that. However, where filling in the oval would have obscured the mark — such as in a partially filled in oval — redacting tape was placed over the oval, and then the worker marked the tape. In all cases, the enhancement was done by a two-person team with an observer present, and a log of the changes were kept as required by law.

Just to be sure, I confirmed this with Logan after the meeting. So again… this is a non-issue.

The Felon Vote

Logan says that the department has passed on to the prosecutors office a list of about 100 suspected felon votes. The prosecutor will investigate, and pass on to the sheriff’s office those cases that warrant further investigation. This is the standard procedure, but when asked, Logan did not know of a single case in which a felon has been prosecuted for voting.

Councilmember Steve “I love grandmothers” Hammond attempted to grandstand on this and other issues, demanding “a head to roll” for election worker errors. But as Logan explained, the felon vote was not due to election worker error, as they do not currently have the ability or the authority to perform background checks on registered voters. To back up this claim, Logan cited RCW 29A.08.520:

RCW 29A.08.520
Felony conviction. (Effective until January 1, 2006.)

Upon receiving official notice of a person’s conviction of a felony in either state or federal court, if the convicted person is a registered voter in the county, the county auditor shall cancel the defendant’s voter registration.

That’s it. When the county receives notice from the court of a felony conviction, the felon is removed from the rolls. But there is no statutory authority to do so at any other time, and indeed no way to do so without a centralized database.

Hammond suggested that background checks would fit with the spirit of the law. And newly minted Councilmember Reagan Dunn (who eerily resembles Liev Shreiber’s character in “The Manchurian Candidate”, in both appearance, manner and um… circumstance) took the opportunity to tout his experience as a federal prosecutor in pointing out that, well… I’m not really sure what he was pointing out, except that he put a lot of bad people behind bars and there’s gotta be an awful lot more felons on the rolls than King County realizes.

Which may be true. But what both Hammond and Dunn fail to acknowledge is that it’s all really a moot point. If they were paying attention to Logan’s explanation, and had bothered to read the RCW, they would have noticed that the current statute expires on Jan. 1, 2006, and is replaced with the following:

RCW 29A.08.520
Felony conviction. (Effective January 1, 2006.)

Upon receiving official notice of a person’s conviction of a felony in either state or federal court, if the convicted person is a registered voter in the county, the county auditor shall cancel the defendant’s voter registration. Additionally, the secretary of state in conjunction with the department of corrections shall arrange for a periodic comparison of a list of known felons with the statewide voter registration list. If a person is found on the department of corrections felon list and the statewide voter registration list, the secretary of state or county auditor shall confirm the match through a date of birth comparison and cancel the voter registration from the official state voter registration list. The canceling authority shall send notice of the proposed cancellation to the person at his or her last known voter registration address.

Now maybe I’m naive, but my take is that if the statute actually granted county officials the authority and ability to routinely purge the rolls of felons, the Legislature wouldn’t be adding a provision that grants county officials the authority and ability to routinely purge the rolls of felons. This change is required by the federal HAVA act, and becomes effective by the federal deadline, coinciding with completion by the Secretary of State of the statewide database that makes its provisions possible.

Did felons vote? Sure. Was it King County’s fault? No. Shouldn’t we do something about this? We already are.

So, if Dino Rossi can prove that the felon vote changed the outcome of this election, then I guess he’ll be named governor. But if you’re looking for proof of corruption or incompetence in King County Elections… you’ll have to look elsewhere.

Whew!

I hadn’t meant to write in such detail, so I’m going to post Part I now, and then post Part II upon it’s completion. Coming up… Provisional Ballots and the so-called “Discrepancy.”

[For more information, read King County’s 2004 Elections Report.]

UPDATE:
Read Part II.