My column in this week's The Stranger is up!

"Confidence Man"

"Our goal this election is to build voter confidence," exhorted instructor Barnaby Dow at the outset of my poll-worker training session last week. After chronicling last year's fiasco of illegal voting on my blog, I volunteered to spend two days this fall as a poll judge, doing my own bit to restore integrity to the system. Building voter confidence is a goal for County Executive Ron Sims too, being that he is chiefly responsible for the collapse of voter confidence in the first place. But judging from my training session, Sims's team still has a ways to go.

I later discovered that Barnaby Dow isn't an experienced elections person. He's a member of Sims's own staff and enough of a team player to have donated $700 to Sims's recent campaigns—even though he's only here on a temporary engagement and still votes back home in Alaska.

Barnaby Dow is listed in the King County directory as an "Executive Fellow", reporting to chief-of-staff Kurt Triplett. The "fellowship"s seem to be a kind of internship for up-and-coming high-level civil servants, who, say, complete a mid-career Master's Degree program at the Kennedy School as Dow did. His main duties have had nothing to do with elections, but apparently with public communications for DDES. Dow apparently still considers Sitka, Alaska to be his primary residence, as he votes there but is NOT registered to vote in King County. So I find it interesting that he would care so deeply who we King County residents choose for our Executive. I have no indication that his various donations to Sims campaigns are any kind of a quid pro quo, but I will observe that all of the other Executive Fellows have made contributions to Sims' campaigns. On the other hand, I can't find any record of any other campaign contribution made by Barnaby Dow in Washington, Alaska or anywhere else. Dow is also listed on Ron Sims' campaign website as an endorser. Now I'm sure anybody who takes a high level internship in any administration must have to admire their boss. But it strikes me as a little unseemly to stack the pollworker training with Sims loyalists who have little elections experience ("we wanted to beef up the pollworker training, so it's all hands on deck" a Sims spokesman told me) but not bring in, say, more experienced poll workers who aren't necessarily Sims camp followers.