No surprise there you might say, if you have paid any attention to the many problems with mailed ballots, here and in Britain.
But this lost ballot shows that even sophisticated voters, even the mayor of Seattle, can err. And that there is no immediate check, as there is when you vote in person, to prevent those errors.
Mayor Mike McGinn was an outspoken supporter of Seattle's school levies, which passed after Tuesday's special election. But his own ballot didn't get counted, because it arrived late and through King County interoffice mail.
McGinn spokesman Mark Matassa said Thursday that the mayor dropped his ballot in an outgoing mail pile in City Hall last Friday, intending to send it through the U.S. mail. For some reason, the envelope ended up at King County Elections headquarters in Tukwila via the county's interoffice mail system.
Since it arrived too late, and was not postmarked, it was not counted.
If Mayor McGinn has trouble getting the procedures right, then we should expect that less sophisticated voters will get them wrong even more often. From time to time, those errors will add up, and will change the results of an election.
Cross posted at Jim Miller on Politics.
Posted by Jim Miller at February 24, 2010 05:40 AM | Email ThisHad he just dropped it in a mailbox, then this probably would not have happened. I suspect this situation is pretty rare (city/county/municipal employee puts ballot in US Mail slot, but ballot somehow gets to Elections without a postmark).
I'm not disagreeing with the general point -- I would expect that all-mail elections are statistically more unreliable (lost/rerouted ballots, attempts to game the system, fraudulent ballots) than in-person. But I suspect this may not be the best case to prove that point.
Posted by: erich on February 24, 2010 07:35 AMI think this points more to Government employees trying to use "voter intent" when making decisions. You know, like happens with ballots each election; it doesn't matter what the voter actually did, it matters what a Government employee believes the voter wanted to do.
Consequences be damned.
Posted by: Shanghai Dan on February 24, 2010 08:05 AMOn the other hand, voting by mail results in much higher turnout. Sure, those extra voters could vote in person if they were willing to take the time, so you can call them lazy, but the bottom line is that more citizens participate.
That's the tradeoff: is it worth getting a lot of "lazy" voters (I use quotes because they're just making a time management decision) if that means losing a very small number of conscientious voters? It's easy to mock laziness, but there are real advantages to helping as many citizens as possible get involved in their government.
Posted by: Bruce on February 24, 2010 10:30 AMIf they're too lazy to walk or drive the few blocks to a polling place, they may be too lazy to properly research the issues and make informed votes.
The right to vote is sacrosanct; however at the same time there is a willful need by the person to exercise that right. If someone thinks it's more important to watch that rerun of The Office rather than spend 10 minutes at the voting poll, so be it. They have chosen to not exercise their right and that IS their right.
Posted by: Shanghai Dan on February 24, 2010 10:43 AMI'm not saying that he didn't pay for a postage stamp, I wouldn't know. However, he did use a system where a paid city worker no doubt had to handle his personal mail and take it to the post office.
Posted by: Doug on February 24, 2010 11:09 AMUnless we require proof of citizenship to register and proof of identity to vote, then Bruce's kind of people will run any kind of election... kind of like Rossi-Gregoire in 04... not that he'll care as long as it goes his way.
Posted by: Hinton on February 24, 2010 11:31 AMEver since pierce county had the crooked auditor that liked to count ballots early and in secret I don't mail them. I also don't turn them in early.
There is more to this story than you indicate.
There is NOTHING difficult or too complicated about putting a stamp on one's ballot and dropping it into a mailbox by the due date.
The MAYOR had MONTHS in which to conduct that "Complex Operation", but, at the last minute he delegated HIS personal responsibility to his underlings.
To me this a PRECIOUS part of my dossier on the Mayor since one of the key elements in his campaign for office was that HIS voting record was slightly higher than Mallahan's.
Didn't take him long to nullify that point, nor did it take him more than 12 days in office to reverse his promise to protect Seattle property owners from extra taxation relating to the tunnel corridor.
The Mayor, based his decision to conduct an emergency, fast tracked, Sea-Wall rebuild after reflecting upon a State Dept of Transportation disaster depicting Sea Wall collapse in a CARTOON animation.
CARTOON !!! How about actual video proving NO problems along the Sea-Wall during the 6.8 Nisqually Quake.
Posted by: Bart Cannon on February 24, 2010 01:18 PMTherefore, voting by mail is a bad system.
By the way, I may be the only person left in Snohomish County who has never voted by absentee, and has never missed an election ...
On the other hand, voting by mail results in much higher turnout.
False, and irrelevant. We want ACCURATE elections MUCH more than we want MORE voters. If you can't be bothered to vote under a normal system, why should I be bothered to care that you can't be bothered to vote?
But it's not true, either. In Snohomish County, we went to all-mail in 2006, so that's the first election of all-mail results that you see. In 1996, we had 76.08%; 1997, 56.25%; 1998, 62.14%; 1999, 59.33%; 2000, 74.94%; 2001, 46.79%; 2002, 56.91%; 2003, 40.25%; 2004: 84.31%; 2005, 49.68%; 2006, 62.28%; 2007, 51.18%; 2008, 87%; 2009, 48.61%.
To basically summarize those numbers: we had a slight increase in our one Presidential election since the change, but that can probably be explained better by Obama and a general trend (note that 2004 is much greater than 2000 and 1996) than all-mail voting.
In the non-Presidential even years, 2006 was greater than 2002, but was even with 1998. In odd years, we have over 50 percent in 97 and 99, less than 50 percent in 2001 and 2003, then AT 50 percent in 2005 and 2007, and a little less in 2009.
Again, of course, with all of these, there's current political factors that are affecting turnout too, but we're just not seeing "much higher turnout."
Granted, we had optional mail voting for those years, but in 2004 we had one-third of our voters NOT voting by mail, and in 2005 (being an off-year) it was one-fourth (since people are most inclined to do their "civic duty" of going to the ballot booth in Presidential years). So that's an obviously significant percentage of the voters, and we'd expect to see a significant difference in the turnout. But there's isn't one.
Now, granted, it could be different in a county or state that RESTRICTS mail voting. The "lazy" people would not be the non-absentee voters, and therefore would already be voting by mail. And WA did not restrict mail voting before moving to almost-all-mail voting. But the numbers we have don't back up your claim, regardless.
Sure, those extra voters could vote in person if they were willing to take the time, so you can call them lazy
I don't call them anything. I just recognize that I don't have a reason to care for them, if they don't care for themselves. Isn't that common sense?
It's not like these are children who need to be pushed to do something they don't want, or adults trying to do something they need help doing. It's just people who choose to not do something because they just don't really care. That's all it is.
Voting in person is NOT hard. Polls are open early and stay open late. And if you really cannot vote in person, almost every state allows you to file as an absentee voter. You just need to say "I can't make it," and they let you vote by mail (as opposed to having everyone vote by mail, or allowing anyone to vote by mail merely out of convenience).
That's the tradeoff: is it worth getting a lot of "lazy" voters ... if that means losing a very small number of conscientious voters?
Obviously not.
there are real advantages to helping as many citizens as possible get involved in their government
Voting is not getting involved. Getting involved is something you do prior to voting. That's a real danger, actually, in making sure as many people as possible vote: you get people to vote without actually thinking about how they are voting.
I want everyone to vote ... if they are inclined to do so. I do not want anyone to vote just because they think they should for some mythical "civic duty." It's nonsense. You vote because you have something to vote for, not because voting by itself means anything.
Of course, you and I have opposite interests: people, especially in this state, tend to vote liberal when they don't actually follow politics. They think silly and childish notions like "government should provide everything people need, if they don't have it" without thinking through the consequences of it. Their first impulse to any perceived wrong is "there oughtta be a law!" instead of thinking that maybe there's better ways to go about it.
But that really doesn't play into my thinking, which is just simply that our system should obviously care more about ACCURACY than making voting brain-dead easy for people who don't really care about voting anyway. This seems to be an obvious truism.
Really? I'm not sure how you define "follow politics", but one group that follows politics as a profession -- political reporters -- is regularly faulted by conservatives for being liberal.
Posted by: Bruce on February 24, 2010 06:35 PMYes.
I'm not sure how you define "follow politics", but one group that follows politics as a profession -- political reporters -- is regularly faulted by conservatives for being liberal.
That data point has absolutely no bearing on the point I made. You are not very good at reading, oftentimes. Your comment here assumes that I claimed that someone who is liberal does not follow politics, but I said it the other way around. I drew no conclusions about people who are liberal, only about people who don't follow politics, particularly in this state.
@11 I know I voted liberal (and high) before I followed politics. Thank God my last such vote was Nader in 2000.
@13 just Google "Soundpolitics voter" and start hunting.
Posted by: Matt M on February 25, 2010 02:16 AM