I just realized something. Voters are not notified when their mail ballot is not cast. For whatever reason. That is wrong. Imagine if 1%, 5%, or even 20% of your financial transactions simply didn't go through and no one told you.
I was rereading Mail Ballot Horror Show(V): A 20% error rate last night. Please, everyone, read that post again. I guess I knew. But I didn't make the connections until this morning.
Each disfranchised voter must be promptly told when their ballot wasn't cast, why the error occurred, and the steps necessary to prevent the error in the future. The current "see no evil" absentee system must be changed into a responsible system. Before we even consider forced mail voting.
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I'm pretty paranoid. When I was using an absentee ballot, I would walk it into the poll site and drop it off. (I didn't realize until I was a poll worker that mail ballots get counted somewhere else.) And then I call the elections office to make sure my ballot was cast.
Ha. As Armen Yousoufian discovered, being paranoid isn't enough.
Imagine the voter who dropped a ballot into the mail box the day of the election after the pickup time. Maybe year after year. Who would tell that voter there's a problem? Just thinking about it gets me worked up.
The forced mail voting enthusiasts claim the voters have already chosen mail balloting. Voters don't know when their ballots aren't being cast, when their votes aren't being counted. What would happen if they did know?
After Armen told us his story, my girlfriend asked if he switched his registration to poll site voting. She had just come up with the idea of our first protest. You could see Armen's lights come on as he thought it through. It was a beautiful thing.
The enthusiasts also make the dubious claim that forced mail voting will boost turnout. If only. We can boost turnout 5% overnight. Simply eliminate no-excuses absentee balloting. No alleged increase in turnout could possibly outweigh the number of ballots we're already tossing into the trash.
Left and right should agree on this. We lefties oppose secret vote counts on proprietary gear. The righties oppose the insecurity and inaccuracy of mail balloting. We both oppose the loss of the secret ballot. Recently, I heard someone say "touchscreen voting is the electronic version of mail balloting". Exactly!
People! We're talking about the same things!
Tasks performed by computers fail all the time. Sometimes big, sometimes small. It's considered best practices to alert the user and explain why. I call it "failing silently" when a computer doesn't do both. It's pretty much a deal breaker.
My original pet cause was opposing the Diebold touchscreen voting machines. For very geek reasons. Computing is input -> processing -> output. If you count votes with a computer, to preserve the secret ballot you have to throw data away between input and processing. That makes testing (validation and verification) impossible. Alternately, you can retain the data, and thereby lose the secret ballot. Alas, that's unconstitutional.
I used to think mail voting was preferable to touchscreen voting machines (with or without the voter verified paper audit trail). Then I slowly came to realize that mail voting is at least as bad as the touchscreens. I'm embarrassed that I didn't fully grok the pure wrongness of silently failing (lack of notification of errors) until just today.
Just so every knows, plenty of lefties oppose forced mail voting. Gibney on WashBlog despises it. I work in Ballard. Plenty of lefties at my morning coffee depot. I haven't met a person yet (outside of the party) who supports forced mail ballot. Tuesday morning, a regular named Tom saw me reading the coverage in the PI. He hates mail balloting. I didn't even prompt him. Before our 46 LD caucus, every single one of the precincts at my local caucus approved our Resolution Opposing 100% Vote By Mail Elections. Some of the old timers were very outspoken in their opposition.
So maybe we liberuls are the devil. Whatever else you say about us, know that the rank and file is for election integrity. (Even if some of us occasionally get some of the details wrong.)
Posted by Jason Osgood at June 08, 2006 12:03 PM | Email ThisBut we can all (left and right) agree that some things need to be done right. Voting is one of them. All of us treasure our democratic system and get mighty P.O.'d when somebody tries to mess with it.
Your posts have been solid work, and I've enjoyed reading them. Hope you stick around after we send KCE back to the polls where they belong.
Posted by: Steve_dog on June 8, 2006 11:59 AMThanks,
James S.
It could be prestige. At various times, Logan, Sims, Phillips, have made much of the notion of being the first, best, biggest, brightest county in the nation. Elections wise, I presume.
My girlfriend was reviewing Logan's testimony before the COW two weeks ago. He's very excited about the new toys.
I've been doing computers stuff for a while. I've seen this kind of thing many times. Silver bullet thinking. Getting infatuated with new toys. At a HAVA Grant Board meeting, I heard Logan talk about a handheld version of the voter rolls. For instance, you could look up a voter's precinct. It does sound cool. Just like getting a new iPod. But I don't know that it's needed or useful.
Sims got a lot of heat for that failed computer IT project a year or so back. What was it? $34m? That's nothing. It happens all the time. Most large project fail. Kind of like most new restaurants fail. The complexity and the switchover costs are killer. And nothing ever goes as planned.
This forced mail voting scheme feels just like a large, out of control IT project.
There's three types of people in computers. Newbies, who are enthusiastic about everything, don't know any better, and won't listen to reason. Old timers, who have seen it all before and have learned from their mistakes. And the sharks, who initiate large projects, get the prestige, and then move on before the problems become obvious.
I'd like to think my representatives are newbies versus sharks. But, like I said, opinions differ.
Lastly, once one of these projects gets started, it takes on a life of its own. They're almost unstoppable. The people involved get wedged into a position where they feel they have more to lose by giving up (good money after bad) or can't bring themselves to be the one to pull the train's break line. As they say, no good deed goes unpunished.
Posted by: Jason Osgood on June 8, 2006 01:23 PMPeople who just can't make it to the polls on Election Day would have fourteen days, including two weekends, in which to get the job done. Just like with mail ballots.
But, unlike mail ballots, the ballots would only be in the hands of duly-sworn election officials and the voters, and would not leave the sight of the election workers, and would be put into the ballot box by the voters. And the right, enshrined in the Washington State Constitution, to have the government "secure to every elector absolute secrecy in preparing and depositing his ballot," would be preserved.
Posted by: Legast on June 8, 2006 01:47 PMThis is no small thing. This is the core of a vote by the people. Why are we killing it?
Leave it to government to kill community while building fraud
After the installation of the queen and ALL this crap with voting in this state is there a real point to it?
I really hate to have this attitude, but I just have a real feeling that the dims are going to do whatever they want and my vote is damned wherever I place it.
/so far past disgusted and utterly discouraged.
Posted by: Fox3 on June 8, 2006 04:23 PMBelieve me, many on my side of the fence have felt the same way. But I'll make a deal with you: So long as you stand for election integrity, I'll stand with you.
As long as we breathe, there is hope.
Legast- Absolutely.
G Jiggy- I love being a poll worker. People bring us treats! I get to see my neighbors. It's huge. I'll dig up the cite later, but the UK has experienced a long-term decline in turnout. They suspect forced mail voting creates a culture of non-voters over time.
Posted by: Jason Osgood on June 8, 2006 05:31 PM"You ask several questions related to the handling of ballots that had been improperly challenged (or rejected) in the November 2004 election and the fact that they were subsequently counted during the mandatory gubernatorial recount. That action was taken by the King County Canvassing Board as part of public proceedings related to the mandatory recount based on the identification of the issue prior to the certification of the recount. Only votes for the office of Governor were counted as the rest of the
measures and contests on the ballot had been certified. Those actions were challenged in court and upheld."
In the final sentence of the excerpt, what legal proceeding is Logan referring to?
Were there any, other than the election contest?
If not, does Logan actually believe that Judge Bridge's ruling that petitioners' failed to prove their case also constitutes approval of what he did?
Posted by: ewaggin on June 8, 2006 08:23 PM