King County Council Member Jane Hague is to unveil today Initiative 23, a measure that would be put to the county council, to approve an elected auditor to oversee the troubled King County elections division.
"An elections official who is directly accountable to the people will make the changes desired by the people and the public," campaign manager Tim Jackson said Monday. Jackson works part time on Hague's communications staff. If the initiative campaign succeeds in gathering 46,000 signatures by Nov. 28, the proposal will go before the County Council, which could modify it before submitting it to voters for ratification in November 2006, Jackson said.GOP politicians -- including County Councilman David Irons of Sammamish, who is challenging Democratic County Executive Ron Sims in the November election -- have called previously for an elected auditor. A Sims-appointed task force said in July that the county should consider the change in order to increase accountability.
That task force was charged with reviewing the elections department in the aftermath of the 2004 general election, which was plagued in King County by a host of errors and mistakes, including tabulation of hundreds of provisional ballots without the required voter validation beforehand, the overlooking of more than 100 absentee ballots until it was too late to count them and a failure to reconcile accounts of votes cast with voters voting.
It's a start, and a welcome one. To contribute, or help gather signatures, you can contact the Initiative 23 campaign at Honest Elections Project, a.k.a. H.E. L. P. At first glance, good site. Love that quote from Judge Bridges, too. So true!
Posted by Matt Rosenberg at September 13, 2005 07:34 AM | Email ThisIf King County is overly Democratic and we cannot ensure that we have a competent Executive, than why will electing an elections auditor ensure that person will be competent? Furthermore, if King County is so overly Democratic than where is the competition that you are speaking of? Really, has the Executive's race been competitive since Gary Locke won the first time? What countywide office from Scott Noble, to Norm Maleng, to Ron Sims has actually been competitive over the last ten years? Was Ron Sims less competent than the last two times he won? I don't think so. I think this is a magic fix that really isn't a fix at all. It may not make things worse, but there is not evidence what so ever that it will make things any better. Yes, there are many elected auditors who do a good job, but I would debate your contention that putting a politician into a management position is necessarily the right way to go. Furthermore, I would submit that maybe we should think twice before we put someone into the elections roll whose first question he or she asks on the job could be: what do I have to do to get re-elected. It seems to me that more politics isn't the answer to the election problem. Why don't we at least consider taking the appointment power away from the Executive and giving it to the council before we end up with a system that will mean nothing more than, with the exception of Norm Maleng, another incompetent Seattle Democrat in a county-wide elected post.