Washblog

Poll voting is the best and safest way to get your vote counted in King County.  Now our government wants to take that away and at the same time spend a lot of money and resources on a new election system that is worse than what we currently have.  No thanks!

by panmittens on Mon May 15, 2006 at 07:07:34 PM PST

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3 out of 4 of them don't want to elect Democrats. I see the WCFE - -progressive, huh?  More like their giving cover to scum like EFF and Kathy Lambert.  The Evergreen "Freedom" Foundation wants to "clean" the voter roles of people they think shouldn't vote - people who speak spanish, black people, Democrats, you know.

Considering 70 percent of ballots are ALREADY absentee, what's the difference?  If it was crooked before, it's still crooked.

This "coalition" are a bunch of flat-earthers.

by Belltowner on Mon May 15, 2006 at 08:28:14 PM PST

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Your post essentially says:

I've always voted by absentee/mail. But now that it might be required for others, I'm suddenly opposed to it, and suddenly aware of the terrible risks it poses

This seems more than a little bit disingenuous.
I suppose one always has the right to change their mind. But I don't think you even acknowledge the twisted humor in the situation in your post.
Do you feel badly for having voted absentee all these years?  As a poll voter, will you vote in every election, even it if means sitting in traffic, circling for a parking space, and standing in line?

I've been a 100% poll-voter, and its not because I distrust mail-in voting.
I'm just sentimental and stubborn.
But I see lots of good to mail-in balloting, and I'll be happy to change over when its required of me.

You, you'll just be returning to what you always did after a short-lived and futile protest.

by abelenky on Tue May 16, 2006 at 10:03:46 AM PST

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the majority of voters who vote are already choosing to vote by mail as permanent absentees.  

Check out Goldy's post on HA today
http://www.horsesass.org/index.php?p=1639
and take a look at the map of King County and the percentages of the people who voted by mail in the 2005 Primary as opposed to those who voted at the polls.

If people are concerned that their ballot will get lost by the Post Office, they can check on-line to make sure King County Elections received it.  I am a permanent absentee and have been for years. I always check and they have always received my ballot.  Also, vote by mail guarantees that we will have paper ballots.  

No system is perfect, but I think the majority of voters have already spoken and said they want vote by mail simply because they are already doing it.

by Cherisse on Tue May 16, 2006 at 01:10:52 PM PST

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Belltower weighed in some more:

Right now, we have two choices on how to vote, polling place or by mail.  70 percent choose by mail.  People have already made their preference known!  Maintaining two systems in expensive!

Poll voting is much cheaper.  I don't personally have figures.  (Haven't yet followed thru on my open records requests.)  But even Dean Logan says no longer mail balloting is cheaper.  And recall that there's switchover costs (e.g. a new building just for counting ballots).  In fact, Pierce County rejected 100% vote by mail solely because of increased cost.

70% choose absentee ballots.  So what?  People smoke and drive fast too.  Just because everyone does it doens't make it good for you.  And people have been encouraged to register as permanent absentee status with no real understanding of the risks.  Like me.  Even then, many people walk there ballots to the polling station, like I had always done.

I estimate 40-45% of voters use the polling stations.  If 100% vote by mail was put to a popular vote, I assume it'd pass.  Because I think 50% + 1 vote wins.  That's our flawed "winner takes all" system for ya.

by zappini on Tue May 16, 2006 at 01:28:04 PM PST

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There is a pretty big expense involved in duplicating ballots that the machines refuse to read, often for reasons that are not at all obvious from looking at the ballot.

It's true that you can find out if your ballot was received by checking with the elections office (and also by just dropping it off directly at the polling place), but you can never know whether once received, it is actually counted.  You can correct your ballot at a polling place, but must rely on poll workers to do so at a centralized location.  I oversaw that process in 2005--the pollworkers didn't make any errors that I saw, but they do have a huge workload.  The higher the workload, the more chance of mistakes.

My ideal situation would be to open up the option of getting a ballot in the mail, going to the polling place, and feeding it into the scanner myself.  Remember--voting is the slow step, and tabulation is the fast step.  Getting ballots in the mail avoids the problems inherent in the  first step.

Also, I'd like to see precinct auditing of the ballots by hand count at random sites.

by eridani on Wed May 17, 2006 at 09:56:21 PM PST

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I shouldn't have posted two election integrity posts back to back.  Lesson learned.  I've got a few more queued up.  I'll space them out.

Ivan challenged my assertion that vote by mail is less secure.

There is no evidence that it's any more true of mail voting than it is of poll voting, and all their twists and turns have not established that it is so,

Um. Yea. I've had mail (a box of checks) stolen out of my mail box. And I don't send cash via post. And the USPS in Puget Sound says their mail delivery error rate is 1.4%. (Remember, this is mail balloting.  Be sure to account for coming and going.)

Then, as I said elsewhere, the ballots are touched multiple times by multiple people during processing.

When I vote at a polling station, the chain of custody is unbroken.  As a poll worker, I know how many ballots were issued, how many ballots cast, and how many votes counted.  (Of course, using a precinct-based optical scanner is still a secret vote count.  But that's another discussion.)

Each polling station publicly posts its poll tape.    And a member from each party takes the ballot box to the central location.

(Our rules are always being updated, and I'm not a rules-smith, so these details could have changed.)

by zappini on Tue May 16, 2006 at 01:13:25 PM PST

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what a f#$%ing nightmare.

I had a few hours of training on some different days, the last training being a few days before the election, (on Sunday?) and I still remember having a few duffle bags of ballots in my freaking apartment overnight !!

and a whole bunch of rules and regs I was supposed to know something about, AND

fairly enforce.

I was at my polling place at the Queen Anne Library at the top of the hill, and, lucky me ... 1/2 my "neighbors" are f$%^ing lawyers.

I had know it alls telling me about all kinds of problems all day, primary and general.

know how I resolved it ?

I pointed at the phonebooks or regs, I told the whiner I had training on Sunday for 3 hours, I hate lawyers, this is my decision, call the county, AND

keep making trouble AND I'll call the cops and have you removed.

it was such fun being a prick all day.

at the end of the day, my GREAT retirees and me did what they always did with hundreds of our neighbors ballots, which I suppose was right, but, I was so exhausted I just figured ... well

no one is filling out ballots on their own, so screw it.

Oh yeah, Paige Miller told me about her Yale Law Degree as she was showing me how smart she was and is AND how dumb I was and am.

I hate paper ballots.

rmm.

http://www.liemail.com/BambooGrassroots.html

by rmdSeaBos on Tue May 16, 2006 at 05:29:32 PM PST

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