King County Elections announced today that it "receives top honors for excellence in mail ballot processing" from a national association of election officials. We should all be appalled that the standards of excellence in election operations could be this low.
This document explains that the award is specifically to recognize the relatively small reconciliation discrepancies between mail ballots and mail voters in 2005. It's commendable that Deanron didn't make as many ballot goofs in 2005 as he did in 2004, but 2005 had its own share of problems. As we've mentioned before, roughly 390 ballots from the 2005 primary were apparently never tabulated and there has never been a public explanation for this. In the 2005 general election, we found that the overall error rate on mail ballots was 20%. Many of these are systemic failures of mail voting that are not directly under the control of the elections officials (e.g. voter forgot to sign ballot). But there were also other election official errors, such as the number of prevenatable illegal votes that were improperly tabulated, that were not included in the calculation that was the basis for King County's so-called "award for excellence".
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 25, 2006 10:03 PM | Email ThisI'm sure that what this award represents in the elections world is that you are good at helping to throw an election in favor of Democrats without getting caught.
Posted by: Jeff B. on July 25, 2006 10:36 PMWell, if you could survive having a Republican judge in a Republican county strike down every one of your previous claims, then you can weather this. Fanaticism owes nothing to facts.
The King County Records and Elections are a national example of how to cheat on elections. The machine is oiled and practiced. Institutionalized fraud hurts all voters.
Oh, and most of the recognition systems like this require someone to submit nominations, these don't come out of the blue. My guess is that the nomination came from someone in King County Elections and Records or the Democratic Party Workers.
Posted by: Skeptic on July 26, 2006 12:18 AMBye Bye democracy unless when stand and fight on this issue.
One citizen
One vote
Accountability
Accuracy
Transparency
Responsibility
If you want to see an example of it in overdrive...go to your local City Hall if you live in the Puget Sound Region and take a stroll thought the Planning Dept, you will see whole walls covered with "awards" from the American Planning Association (APA). These "awards" are used to bolster their claim of enlightenment when it comes to telling you how to live YOUR life and to confer credibility and add cache to their schemes.
What this display in fact amounts to is an element of a well-orchestrated propaganda campaign by a left-wing umbrella organization to bestow credibility on fellow travelers and nothing more.
http://nacrc.org/interest_groups/elec_bestpractices2005.htm
With that said I think we can see that this group looks for anything to try to compliment each other on.
I also noticed that all nominees were nominated by their department head (i.e. Dean Logan).
Posted by: TrueSoldier on July 26, 2006 10:41 AMJDH..comment #10 makes a great point.
Posted by: dl on July 26, 2006 05:34 PM"Did you ever visit the countries behind the Iron Curtain? One thing that was not in short supply was �awards� for excellence in everything and anything. They were everywhere, they were nothing but unmitigated horse crap for the most part. Does this surprise me? No, the people who give out these phony baloney �awards� for excellence here in the USA are cut from the same cloth as the former communist apparatchiks."
(Still mad that the capitalists of Fremont bought someone else's surplus statue of Lenin, eh?) Let's see: because a group of criminals on another continent in another century gave bogus awards, that must mean that modern-day Americans do it too! The proof? Their awards contradict my slanders! While wildly illogical, it does make just as much sense as any other statement that Mr. Rossi's supporters have made. The American right wing has long substituted red-baiting for facts, and with good reason: it even supports "logic" of the type shown here.
"Having the elections supervisor from LA come up to Seattle to praise Dean Logan was over the top during the 2004 election fiasco... The King County Records and Elections are a national example of how to cheat on elections."
Care to read, yet again, Judge Bridges' ruling? It addresses that second point most beautifully. What part of "no evidence of fraud" did you not understand?
LA's elections official praised Dean Logan for doing a great job under difficult circumstances, while a host of hateful propagandists screamed "fraud!" where none had happened. Mr. Logan earned such praise from his fellow, and I hope his successor will too.
It does not matter if King County's elections officer is appointed by the County Executive, or elected BY THE SAME VOTERS who choose the Executive; King County's voters will still vote heavily against illiberal candidates and issues, and an accurate count of our votes will show this.
Just because it didn't prevail in court does not mean it didn't happen. We all have moved on from the 2004 election, why haven't you?
BTW: I love the statue of Lenin and what its favored display status in Seattle means. Perfectly illustrates the witless liberal fools who infest what was once a nice town...
Posted by: alphabet soup on August 2, 2006 08:25 AM