The P-I's Daniel Lathrop updates:
Well, not to say that news coverage has an effect on public officials, but after this story ran in today's P-I I got a voice mail from King County Elections spokeswoman Bobbie Egan. Egan told me that officials are now planning to release legislative district breakdowns of the vote some time on Friday. They still maintaining that there is still too much "QC" (quality control) to do on precinct breakdowns because -- amongst other things -- there might be small precincts where everyone voted the same way.An election expert e-mails:
As usual it is complete BS. My guess is that they need the extra time to go over the results and make sure that they didn't give out the wrong ballot style etc. Cover their big asses.In all fairness to King County Elections officials, the sizes of their asses is not the problem. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at November 06, 2007 02:55 PM | Email This
As far as the Precindt Information........every County I've ever had contact with (which is 6) gladly released that information. All they had to do was press a button on Election Night and the "By-Precindt" report was generated. All ELECTED AUDITOR/ELECTION OFFICIALS clearly explained that this data may change for a variety of LEGITIMATE reasons.
It ain't that tough.
Posted by: Mr. Cynical on November 6, 2007 04:03 PMCan someone please explain that to me?
Quality control shouldn't depend on the choice people made at the ballot box - it should be concerned with ballot authentication and the accuracy of the tabulation process.
What am I missing here?
Posted by: Smoley on November 6, 2007 05:41 PMSmoley: the point is that if you release the results by precinct, and only, say, five people voted in a precinct, and maybe you know who those people are, and they all voted the same way ... well, now voter secrecy/privacy is eliminated.
This actually happened to me in a primary, here in Snohomish County. I was in the newspaper announcing I would vote at the voting machine. The election canvass report broke down precincts by how many people voted at the voting machine, and how many by mail. Well, only two people in my precinct voted at the voting machine, and they both voted the same way.
So quite literally, my votes in that primary are a public record, when combined with the relatively innocuous article in the Herald. Look up my precinct (either through the voter DB, or my election as PCO, or through our home purchase), then look up the primary election canvass for that precinct, and you know how I voted.
That's a Bad Thing.
Incidentally, this problem has now been fixed here in Snohomish County, and voting machine counts are not broken out separately any longer.
Posted by: pudge on November 7, 2007 09:57 AMThis situation is not very common, but there are some precincts with as few as a dozen or fewer voters.
One of the big problems with printing out the precinct data before the results are final is with the number of precincts, over 2000 as I recall, and the length of the report which is literally hundreds of pages long. So producing the reults once is also a big cost savings item.
Eventually KC Elections should be able to put this information on-line so that it can be extracted electronically as it is tabulated.