Today's Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a story on the mail ballot protest that took place yesterday (thanks to all who came, by the way).
It was a strange-bedfellows moment: A lawyer from a hard-right advocacy group, a former Green Party candidate and a self-described "dues-paying Democrat" joined Wednesday to protest a proposal for all-mail voting in King County.
Reporter Gregory Roberts had fair coverage of the event, but Logan did the two-step when responding to some of the criticisms raised...
My fellow speakers and I mentioned the lack of accountability in King County's absentee ballot system, as well as the weakness of the signature verification process, as strikes against an all-mail ballot system. Logan's dodged these issues in his response:
the judge who rejected the GOP claim didn't pay much attention to the accounting discrepancies, Logan said, and signature verification wasn't even raised as an issue in the case. Automated verification, approved by the Legislature this year, should bring consistency to the process, he said.
The judge didn't issue "get-out-of-jail-free" cards; he could only consider the evidence that was put before him and properly briefed. As for automated verification, at Monday's briefing before the county council Logan assured the members that any signatures without an almost perfect match would still be looked at by election workers.
If further proof is needed of the problems with all-mail voting, this morning the Everett Herald reported that mail ballots weren't sent to 344 voters for a fire district election. All of them used to be poll voters before Snohomish changed to all-mail ballots this year, and therefore few realized that they hadn't received their ballots until it was too late.
Posted by Jonathan Bechtle at May 18, 2006 08:57 AM | Email ThisRemember the final statement of the judge about people who pick up their paychecks but don't do the work required of them?
That was not an endorsement of the shoddy work done by Logan's gang.
If the intentional violations of the rules had been discovered in time to present them to the court during that trial, the outcome may have been different. But, Logan's gang successfully hid what they had done.
Posted by: Micajah on May 18, 2006 11:04 AMShe's very popular here and is running for re-election. She wants to retire, wanted to retire 4 years ago. The R's have a candidate, who's not up for the task and will probably withdraw by weeksend.
Here's what we are hearing through the political gossip network.
deanron is tiring of being a target for clean voting advocates, commuting from Olalla and now the Kitsap Auditors salary is approaching 100,000, he wants to come back home.
The scenario goes like this. Karen wins in November, first of '07 she announces her retirement and names deanron or his wife Winnie as auditor.
In order for this to work, the dims will have to work very hard to take out our Republican commissioner who's a huge RINO the base hates, (and has a Republican primary challenger), with a RAT 25 year old University of California/ Berkeley graduate, playboy who's been scolded by the WEA for hitting on an attractive WEA rep at a RAT campaign event in Bremerton several weeks ago. I don't think that'll happen.
Unless the RAT's can retake the majority status of the commissioners office, when the PCO's send deanron's name on the list of three replacements for Karen, it's dead on arrival for deanron and that strategery.
It is going to make for an interesting '06 election cycle here in Kitsap.
Posted by: bigfootbob on May 18, 2006 11:38 AMLogan is directly responsible for the actual problems in 2004 and their subsequent coverup. Logan belongs in jail. As long as he's allowed to duck the hard questions, there will be no reform for King County.
As for Logan moving to Kitsap County, that might be a good start because it's unlikely that Sims would be able to appoint someone as depraved as Logan given all of the scurity that would ensue.
If Republican prosecutors behaved the way that Democrat prosecutors have, Logan would have been indicted long ago.
Posted by: Jeff B. on May 18, 2006 12:59 PMI was just thinking the same thing! Please *do* share, John425!
Posted by: libertarianobserver on May 18, 2006 01:35 PM