HorsesAss.Org

Just sat down in Fado to kick off pre-game festivities for the big game tonight. May post updates in this space if the mood strikes.

UPDATE: Fado is now packed. If the Sounders play as poorly as they did on Sunday, this could be an ugly game. This is like a Spanish pro hoops team playing the Lakers. At least Ljungberg should be back tonight.

UPDATE: The Mariners found some offense tonight. 8-4 in the 4th inning in KC.

UPDATE: Stone Roses on the speakers in Fado. It reminds me that one of the reasons that soccer has been so popular in Seattle is because a lot of people here are familiar with the European leagues. A lot of people wearing both Sounders and Barcelona attire this evening.

UPDATE: Barcelona has pink jerseys. Ok.

UPDATE: Messi is the footballer of the year for a reason. Damn.

UPDATE: 4-0. Disappointing but not too surprising. If anyone can locate Knute Berger’s column in Crosscut about how soccer won’t survive here in Seattle, please post in the comments. Hyperlinks are tough from the Blackberry. Thanks.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtTBkxvBq88&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

Good staff don’t let candidates look this stupid:

There may be a reason why Seattle mayoral candidate James Donaldson, is one of the seven dwarves in the race against Mayor Greg Nickels.

This, a tweet from White Center’s Full Tilt Ice Cream:

James Donaldson came to WC yesterday, askin folks to vote for him. I asked him if he knew that we were not in Seattle. He looked confused.

Political advice from the Blathering One: the city limits, man, the city limits!

You know, some of the most important decisions an executive makes involve hiring the folks who work under him. So honestly, who would you rather have running the show as Deputy Mayor… Tim Ceis or Cindi Laws?

From an article at The Hill about former GOP administration staffers running for Congress comes this little tidbit from David Castillo, a Republican candidate intending to take on Democratic Rep. Brian Baird, WA-03.

“I’m going to try to cajole [Bush and Cheney] to come out and do an event for me,” said David Castillo, a former deputy assistant secretary in the Department of Veterans Affairs who also worked in the Homeland Security and Labor departments. “As we progress, I’m hoping to utilize my Bush-Cheney relationships to the fullest extent I can.”

That would be bad news, at least in terms of fundraising, for the other announced Republican candidate. But I really don’t know the landscape on the GOP side, maybe Bush and Cheney would help both of them, that would be cool. Lots of photos.

Last week I stuck my neck out and predicted the Times endorsements in the Seattle City Council races:

Conlin, Bagshaw, Licata and Royer in the City Council races… If they do dual endorsements in Council Districts 4, 6 and 8, throw in Bloom, Israel, and here’s the reach… Forch.

Well, today the Seattle Times endorsed Bagshaw for Position 4, and Licata and Israel for Position 6, proving me right on the money. I’m a psychic.

Updated twice.

The SOS processed another 5,815 R-71 signatures yesterday, and as expected, the percentage of duplicate signatures increased again. 7 dupes in the first batch, 16 in the second, 22 in third; it’s almost exactly what my spreadsheet predicted.

The raw invalidation rate in yesterday’s batch was also the highest thus far, coming in at 14.4 percent, nearly two full points above the 12.43 percent threshold. That brings the raw invalidation rate on the 17,317 signatures processed to date to 12.99 percent. Adjusting for duplicates, and removing from the count the 49 signatures not on file, the invalidation rate on the total sample is now running at approximately 14.55 percent, up only slightly from the total for the first two batches.

While it should be noted that these numbers do not technically represent a random sample, at 12.5 percent of the total signatures submitted, it is already sufficiently large enough to predict R-71’s failure with a high degree of certainty.

Update [Darryl]

This figure shows the required signatures and, for each data dump, a statistical estimate of the expected signatures required.

The estimate of total signatures adjusts for both duplicates and invalid signatures, and to be conservative, I have assumed that all of the “missing signature card” signatures will be found and counted as valid.

There are error bars showing standard sampling error for each day—they are tiny for yesterday’s dump. Clearly, if sampling error is the only error involved, there is no way R-71 will pass. Even after the first data dump day, there was slightly under an 8% chance the final count would put R-71 on the ballet.

The graph does suggest substantial error other than sampling error (i.e. the big swing from day 2 to day 3 that is way outside sampling error), but there is now a huge amount of ground to make up. Still, with only 12.6% of the sample counted as of yesterday, there could be some surprises.

Update 2 [Darryl]

Oops…When I looked back at the program I used to estimate the number of valid signatures I had entered 150 instead of 45 as the number of duplicates (150 is actually the total number of no-matches found so far). So here is the corrected figure:

Correcting the number of duplicates makes a huge difference in a qualitative interpretation. Now, it looks like there is very little non-sampling error (and very little sampling error). If so, this pretty much spells doom for R-71.

Despite some recent court victories and the more progressive stance taken by the Obama Administration with regard to medical marijuana, registered patients in Washington are still ending up in courts across the state. The Cannabis Defense Coalition is following these cases and bringing citizens along both to observe and to let judges and prosecutors know that their willingness to ignore the intent of the state’s voter approved medical marijuana law will not go unnoticed. Not surprisingly, most of these cases occur in rural Washington, where support for the medical marijuana law is not as strong.

There are two important court dates next week. The first is on Monday, August 10 in Shelton. It involves a married couple, John Reed and Karen Mower, both of whom are authorized patients. Mower is terminally ill. During this hearing, the judge will decide if the defendants can use a medical marijuana defense. In previous cases, judges have ruled that even authorized patients cannot use that defense.

The second case is one I’m just becoming familiar with. Some information comes from Ben Livingston at the CDC:

David Hagar was growing medical marijuana as designated provider for his mother Rosa, an authorized patient. Grant County Sheriff’s raided him earlier this year, taking 27 plants (10 of which had no roots, 3 of which were dead) and all his growing equipment.

Mr. Hagar started again growing medical marijuana for his mother, and a few months ago, was raided and arrested by the Grant County Sheriff for the second time this year. This time, his mother was present, and detectives took four marijuana plants, all the growing equipment, and her medical marijuana recommendation.

Hagar will be in court next Tuesday, August 11 in Ephrata at 9am. If you’re interested in being an observer for either hearing, please contact the CDC at info@cdc.coop.

But I do know when I’ll be back again. A week down the Jersey shore, a few days in Pittsburgh for Netroots Nation, and then a few days with my family in Philadelphia, flying back on the night of Aug. 19th.

Not that I won’t be blogging during the next two weeks… just not quite so much.

Join us tonight at the Seattle chapter of Drinking Liberally for an evening of politics under the influence. The festivities take place at the Montlake Ale House, 2307 24th Avenue E. beginning at 8:00 pm.

We may have a little entertainment with discussions about the history of Kenya this evening. Or, perhaps, we should be looking at Australia?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FsqodzZ4Ssg[/youtube]

Not in Seattle? The Drinking Liberally web site has dates and times for 335 other chapters of Drinking Liberally for you to get lost at.

There’s a new Washington Poll on Seattle races out today, and it has the pundits punditing. Over on Slog, Bryan remarks on the four-way statistical tie for second place in the mayor’s race, and the Bag Fee measure’s unsurprising 41-55 deficit. Meanwhile, mayoral challenger James Donaldson is touting his (outside the margin of error) advantage in a head to head matchup with incumbent Greg Nickels, while over at Publicola, Josh seems transfixed by Mike McGinn’s relative advantage with Republican voters.

But the data that jumps out at me are the job approval ratings for Mayor Nickels, and the right track/wrong track numbers for the city of Seattle as a whole.

Now normally, anytime an incumbent’s job approval falls below 50 percent, that’s pretty bad news for one’s reelection prospects, but with Mayor Nickels consistently mired in the mid-thirties throughout much of his two terms, you kinda hafta grade him on a curve. So 46 percent…? I’m betting Nickels people are giddily pinching themselves at such an unexpected outpouring of mild nonsupport.

Combine that with a 55-32 percent advantage on the right track/wrong track question, and Seattle voters don’t come across nearly as negative and pessimistic as Nickels challengers were counting on.

I know this was supposed to be the Summer of our discontent, but if you still believe that the runner-up, whoever he or she may be, will waltz into the mayor’s office come November, get ready to be disappointed.

I received a mailing from Susan Hutchison. It’s vapid, empty, and nonspecific (apparently, she’s for accountability, against waste, and supports small business, jobs and the environment), but that’s all really beside the point. The point is, I received a mailing from Susan Hutchison.

Quite frankly, I don’t remember the last time I’ve received a mailing from a Republican. What little information there is in the voting roles about party affiliation (zip code and participation in presidential primaries), there’s enough to mark me as a strong Democrat in an overwhelmingly Democratic district, so Republican campaign consultants generally assume that it’s a complete and utter waste of money mailing me literature. And rightly so.

But not Hutchison’s.

Either the Hutchison campaign is not efficiently targeting their mailing lists, or, as I’m guessing is more likely the case, they’ve made the strategic decision that they’ll have enough money to target strong Democrats in the hope that we won’t have enough information to know that Hutchison has long been a partisan, conservative Republican.

This is, of course, the major drawback to our new “nonpartisan” elections for county offices; by removing the R or the D next to the candidates’ names we deny voters one of the most useful pieces of information in determining where candidates stand on crucial issues. That is, we end up with a less informed electorate.

And that is exactly what Hutchison is counting on.

I’m heading out of town for a couple weeks, so I just filled out my ballot, and in the interest of wearing my bias on my sleeve, I thought I’d share. In ballot order:  Dow Constantine, Anne L. Ellington, Rob Holland, Max Vekich, Greg Nickels, Dorsol Plants, Jessie Israel, Bobby Forch, Approved and Charlie Mas.

These aren’t endorsements, and these aren’t necessarily the folks I’d like to see win. In fact, in at least one of these races, I plan to vote for somebody else in November. But I have my reasons, such as rewarding good candidates I expect to lose. So don’t read more into this than intended.

Hey Chris… what the hell is up with that headline?  Um, “so far, so good” for whom?

So far, so good on anti-gay rights measure signature check

The secretary of state’s office said Monday evening that it has completed its second day of checking signatures on Referendum 71 – the attempt to repeal Washington’s “everything but marriage” same-sex domestic partner law.

So far the error rate is low, 12.31 percent.

R-71 proponents turned in 137,689 signatures – 14 percent more than the minimum needed to be placed on the November ballot. Whether Referendum 71 will ultimately qualify is still unclear.

As of Monday state election workers had checked 11,502 signatures, and 10,087 have been OK’d with 1,415 rejected, mostly because the person does not show up on the voter rolls.

Okay, let me explain this for my friends in the media one last time. Juxtaposing a 12.31 percent invalidation rate versus that widely quoted 14 percent cushion tells the reader absolutely nothing. In fact, it misinforms by implying that signatures are being invalidated a full 1.69 percent below the maximum rate, when in fact the actual maximum invalidation rate beyond which the measure fails to qualify for the ballot, the signature cushion divided by the number of signatures submitted, is 12.43% (17,112/137,689).

Math matters.

In fact, math matters so much that it can give us valuable insight into the true prospects for R-71… prospects which, given the latest batch of numbers, don’t look so good so far for R-71’s sponsors.

Without adjusting for the exponential increase in duplicate signatures as the sample size increases, the invalidation rate on the first batch of 5,646 signatures was 11.34 percent, while the invalidation rate on the second batch of 5,856 signatures rose to 13.35 percent… not exactly what R-71 backers were hoping for. I’ve yet to see a breakout of duplicates in the second batch, so I can’t refine our 3 to 3.25 percent projection of the duplication rate for the entire universe of signatures, but when adjusting the combined 12.31 percent rate from the 11,502 signatures checked thus by the number of duplicates projected from the first sample, we’re now looking at a total invalidation rate in excess of 15 percent. Which would be pretty typical for a petition drive using a mix of volunteer and paid signature gatherers.

To put that in perspective, should these trends hold up, R-71 would fall short of the 120,577 minimum by over 3,500 valid signatures, or nearly 3 percent.

Failing by 3 percent is a lot different than passing by 1.69 percent, dontcha think? Like I said, math matters.

Speaking of which, it doesn’t take much more data to declare R-71’s failure a near statistical certainty, whatever the final margin, and Darryl will run some simulations as the next few batches come in. But honestly, this measure is toast.

UPDATE:
The SOS has broken out the dupes from yesterday’s batch: 16… which is roughly along the lines of what would be expected, as the percentage of dupes increases with the total sample size. (There were 7 dupes in the first, slightly smaller batch.) Darryl’s simulations are more accurate, but my rough calculations now project a roughly 2.4% duplication rate. Combined, this comes to about an adjusted 14.5% invalidation rate across the two batches, well above the maximum 12.43% rate needed to qualify.

It’s happening here.

Then Cong. Smith asked for comments, and the comments began. The first question: would this new plan include tax payer support for abortion? The next question, from one of the young fellas sitting in front of me: on page … of the House bill, (reading from a copy he had obtained from the internet) it says plainly that if an individual elects the public insurance option, he can never ever have private insurance again. Then many people in the room started to vocalize and clap, drowning out Cong. Smith’s response, and shouting arguments to him.

He asked for people to line up at the microphones for comments. Many people did line up… They spoke of their distrust of the government; the post office, social security, etc; they did not want their health care in the hands of bureaucrats. Several people said in a very angry tone of voice, I just want you (Cong. Smith) to be the first to take this new public insurance, and see how YOU like it. At this, the people in the room jeered, some shook their fists, some said angrily Yeah!

When Cong Smith then took a question from an elderly person sitting up front, who had not lined up at the microphone, a young man shouted loudly that she should wait her turn, why did HE have to stand up if she didn’t… Much supportive vocalization from the seated people. More comments from the next person at the microphone: People who are uninsured now can afford to buy insurance, they just don’t. Many people qualify for medicaid and they just don’t bother. The statistics of infant mortality (the US being number 42 or so in industrialized countries) are false…

So um, hey, maybe reporters could say, walk up to these “opponents” and ask them basic stuff. It wouldn’t be that hard, if there were reporters available and if they knew how to do their jobs and stuff. Just an idea. I guess it’s kind of hard to do since so many veteran political reporters are not working for newspapers any longer.

All this “anger,” and nobody to cover it. If editorial boards ever caught wind of this from reading their own newspapers, fainting couches and smelling salts would be in darn short supply. There is nothing more horrible than partisan incivility, as the editorial boards so frequently remind us.

(Props to WFSE Political Blog.)

The headline on the Seattle Times front page asks “137,689 names later, gay community asks: How did they do it?” in regards to Referendum 71, while over on Slog, Dominic Holden looks at the apparently low invalidation rate on the first batch of signatures and declares “This (Probably) Means War!“…

In case you haven’t heard, a preliminary check of signatures for anti-gay Referendum 71 shows the measure may qualify for the ballot. Some quick math: Elections officials scanned 5,646 petition signatures and found that 4,991 were valid as of last Friday, says secretary of state’s office spokesman David Ammons. That’s a 11.34 inaccuracy rate (which is unusually low compared to a standard inaccuracy rate for Washington petitions of only about 18 percent). Referendum backer Protect Marriage Washington submitted 137,689 total signatures, which would give them a 14 percent cushion. But they’re beating that cushion by nearly three points. If they keep it up through the rest of the signature count, the religious bigots will succeed at putting domestic partner rights of gay couples up to a public vote in November.

Geez… doesn’t anybody read HA on the weekends?

First of all, even if the invalidation rate was as low as 11.34%, they are still not “beating that cushion by nearly three points,” for the media (aided by a lack of clarity on the part of the SOS) is comparing the invalidation rate to the wrong number. R-71’s sponsors submitted 137,689 signatures, 17,112 (or 14.20%) more than the 120,577 minimum required. But since the invalidation rate is calculated against the signatures submitted and counted, so to must the so-called cushion, coming to a 12.43% (17,112/137,689) threshold for invalid signatures beyond which the measure fails to qualify for the ballot.

So based on the raw data from the first batch of signatures processed, R-71 is squeaking by, but by little more than a point.

But, as I explained on Saturday, the reported 11.34% invalidation rate on the first batch of 5,646 signatures is deceptively low because such a small sample cannot reflect the true percentage of duplicate pairs within the total universe of 137,689 submitted signatures. The reason, if you think about it, is obvious, but rather than trying to explain this again myself, I’ll just let the Secretary of State’s Office do so in its own words, from a 2006 FAQ regarding the rejection of I-917:

Duplicates play an important role in the state’s formula that determines the rejection rate on a random check.

In the normal course of events, finding duplicates in a random sample bears directly upon the size of the sample being done.

For example, a random check of 100 names out of 266,006 would not be expected to find any duplicates, but a random check of 200,000 names would be expected to find duplicates. Thus, the size of the pool increases exponentially the likelihood of duplicates.

Finding duplicates in a small 4% sample suggests that the number of duplicates that exists in the entire pool is exponentially larger.

The mathematical algorithm adopted by the state contains calculations designed to account for this dynamic.

Thus, the state is not able to finally determine the rejection rate on a particular initiative simply by looking at the signatures approved and rejected. The formula also calculates the acceptable number of duplicates for the sample size.

The SOS doesn’t specifically share its algorithm for projecting duplicate signature rates, but from the data provided in the I-917 FAQ, one can make a pretty good guess. The SOS reported 24 dupes found amongst 10,819 signatures sampled out of 266,006 submitted, yet projected a 5.45% duplication rate… exponentially larger than the 0.22% rate within the sample itself.

So how did the SOS come up with that larger number? They appear to be dividing the number of dupes by the sample ratio (sample size over total submitted), and then dividing the quotient by the sample size, as in:

( 24 / ( 10,819 / 266,006 ) ) / 10,819 = 5.45%

Run the data from the first batch of R-17 signatures through the same equation and rather than the current 0.12% duplication rate, you get:

( 7 / ( 5,646 / 137,689 ) ) / 5,646 = 3.02%

Now, separate the 7 dupes from the other 633 signatures rejected in the first batch, and you get a projected total invalidation rate of 14.23%… not at all bad by historical standards, but nearly two points worse than what is needed to qualify.

So… how reliable are these projections? It’s hard to say. The sample size is pretty small, and we have no reason to believe the first batch was particularly random. Furthermore, while I’m no statistician, the formula above does strike me as rather unsophisticated. (That said, Darryl ran his own simulations on the same data and came up with a slightly higher projected duplication rate of 3.25%.)

What I can say with absolute certainty is that the duplication rate is dramatically underreported in the first batch, and that it will steadily rise as the aggregate sample size gets larger, increasing the total invalidation rate with it. Thus, while the press may hope for the contentious R-71 to qualify for the ballot and continue to generate headlines, in answer to the Times’ question, “How did they do it?”, the most likely answer will be:  “They didn’t.”