Sound Politics: "An accuracy rate any bank would envy"

January 14, 2007

"An accuracy rate any bank would envy"

Ron Sims' IT department continues to confirm our confidence in Sims' self-aggrandizing claims of "Excellence in Government".

1) The King County Recorder's office (sister department of Elections) is spending the month restoring back-ups of real-estate and other records that have been offline due to a hardware failure. (Next time, maybe try redundancy)

2) Right after the 2006 election was certified, I requested current database records, including a voter list and lists of absentee and provisional ballots. I finally got the data on Friday, and it was a bunch of garbage. For example, the provisional ballot file includes only 287 of the more than 13,000 ballots processed in November 2006. And while the county recently reported having 974,340 active registered voters, the file they gave me contains only 435,000 active voters. Among the missing voters? Ron Sims.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at January 14, 2007 02:56 PM | Email This

Comments

1. "Online access to the files was lost because of a hardware failure in a computer-server system Jan. 1"

Has the County ever heard of Mainframes? There must be a few Mainframe users here. When was the last time your group had a long term (more than a few minutes) data access failure or loss? When was the last time your organization had to IPL (reboot) the mainframe? Can we say 1998, maybe? A mainframe can do the work of hundreds of "computer-servers".

Posted by: Easy Goin' on January 14, 2007 03:31 PM

2. Within the 21 residential housing structures on my short block I found 12 registered voters that I believe have either moved elsewhere or into the after-life. Such homework was turned over to the King County Republican Party in mid-December, 2006 Imagine how massive the overstated number of valid, legal, registered voters number in King County really is and that there really are far fewer than 974,000 valid, legally registered voters. WHO WILL CLEAN UP THIS MESS???

Posted by: Alan Deright on January 14, 2007 05:30 PM

3. http://www.metrokc.gov/elections/docs/sixsigmagoals.pdf

Mr Simms can say phrases such as Excellence in Government, Best Practices, Benchmarking, etc but unfortuneately he does not understand what they mean

Posted by: Green Lake Mark on January 14, 2007 05:37 PM

4. Every time you think KC couldn't do any worse..... As someone who has worked as a database professional for 25 years, I can tell y'all there is NO EXCUSE for something like this (it is what the people in my organization would call a ''career-changing event'').

And these days you don't even need a mainframe (although there is a lot to be said for the hardware and software that make mainframes and super-minicomputers like I worked on ultra-reliable):
Microsoft Windows Server and SQL-Server 2005 support mirroring and auto-failover OUT OF THE BOX (of course it doesn't set itself up automatically). The cost of a dedicated off-site backup server and the software to make that work is relatively inexpensive (compared to the cost of disasters like this one).

Although what was it Napoleon once said:
~~''Never automatically ascribe to deliberate malice that which is easily explainable by ordinary gross incompetence''.

Posted by: Methow Ken on January 14, 2007 05:39 PM

5. Ron sims made the Seahawks lose today. Just kidding, but have to be pissed. We should have made the plays to win. Didn't.

As far as back on topic...I'm very disturbed that our government doesn't believe is reliability. They love the slogan, but not the facts. Why is that? Is it because they don't care? Probably. We are just serfs...to be used and discarded.

Posted by: Dengle on January 14, 2007 06:16 PM

6. I'm not banking at Ron Sims Bank thank you!

Posted by: GS on January 14, 2007 06:16 PM

7. Hilarious! Keep up the great work Stefan. Sound Politics is the only entity keeping these folks honest.

Posted by: Hindu on January 14, 2007 06:35 PM

8. Rheta Grimsley Johnson, a writer at the Atlanta Journal & Constitution wrote a column in 2000 entitled "Incompetents Among Us Are Too Often Rewarded" in which she observed:

"Computers, of course, exponentially compound incompetence, magnify and amplify stupid mistakes. Incompetents love them."

Posted by: Organization Man on January 14, 2007 06:53 PM

9. 900k, 400k, maybe rounding? "good enough for government work."

...and the voters keep electing them...

reminds me of imaginary hospital ER admissions note: "...gun discharged into patient's foot---cause & intent unknown..."

so--when are we going to stop laughing about this over a beer & a blog and actually FIX the gol-darn system & problems?

Posted by: jimmie-howya-doin on January 14, 2007 07:08 PM

10. It's my understanding that the King County Computer system used for payroll checks costs almost $20.00 per check to process. ADT services offered to outsource King County payroll for about $2.75 per name and the offer was declined. Perhaps having an outside source view King County's payroll might be a problem for them.

Posted by: Walters on January 14, 2007 07:09 PM

11. My wife is the CEO of a local credit union - the only accuracy she accepts is perfection....

Posted by: H Moul on January 14, 2007 08:14 PM

12. Highest possible bond rating, a series of awards for good government, and an excellent local economy. Oh wait, they did a couple things possible wrong, so I guess all that doesn't matter.

Most Counties would be lucky to have the government KC does.

Posted by: Giffy on January 14, 2007 08:33 PM

13. Stefan,

Sims doesn't want to give you the real data, because then you'd find mistakes, inconsistencies and who knows what else. Better to just ship you a garbage file so it gets blamed on KC IT. Not that the IT department is any more competent than any other aspect of Sims' government. One could easily build a more reliable database running on a cheap RAID array with MySQL on Linux. And the whole thing would be almost free minus the cost of commodity hardware. But that wouldn't suit Sims either, because they've got to spend their budget to justify their existence.

Posted by: Jeff B. on January 14, 2007 08:50 PM

14. Giffy #12 Let me guess. The organizations that gave KC a series of awards for good government were either government agencies themselves or groups that feed at the trough.

Posted by: Moondoggie on January 14, 2007 08:52 PM

15. We need Sims to someday take the Patty Murray seat; would be double win; get rid of dimbulb and sadly Sims is smarter than her

Posted by: righton on January 14, 2007 09:25 PM

16. Thanks for outing this garbage. I still can't figure out why Sims didn't get busted for the blog entry about the guy forced to put on a fund-raiser (with "encouragement by sims flunkies) to get his building permit. The evidence was there.

Posted by: Me on January 14, 2007 10:26 PM

17. Flood control? What was the name of the woman that drowned in her basement?

So the left gives awards to the left. Surprised?
I wonder if they really believe they received the awards for the reasons stated? If they do, then they really have problems. If they don't, the we have problems. Either way we lose.

Giffy is no doubt a kool-aid drinker at the Sims party.

Posted by: Snuffy on January 14, 2007 11:30 PM

18. ...but we have plenty of money and resources to build and swoon (in special newspaper section) over the new "art park" in Seattle. priorities, i guess.

Posted by: jimmie-howya-doin on January 15, 2007 04:02 AM

19. Righton, Ron Sims' 2007 Martin Luther King Day statement basically said opportunities are limited for blacks in Washington State. Obviously there's no chance for an elected King County administrator who is black to succeed based upon his statement.

Posted by: Doc-T on January 15, 2007 09:18 AM

20. In fact, Ron Sims (and his ex-mayor buddy Norm Rice) was elected because a majority of whites voted for him.

Posted by: Misty on January 15, 2007 09:46 AM

21. Snuffy, I know this is hard for many people, but there is a difference between the CITY and the COUNTY. The blame, if any, for that womens death rests with the city of Seattle which built, maintained, and operated the storm drain system.

Posted by: Giffy on January 15, 2007 10:02 AM

22. Giffy,

Who is the mayor of the city? A Republican or Democrat?

$100K toilet/crack houses and $10 million to maintain them. Nice to see the crack whores are being served by the liberals of Seattle. Or was that the "booming economy" you talked about?

Posted by: pbj on January 15, 2007 10:47 AM

23. But Giffy, the City of Seattle is run exclusively via the chokehold of touchy-feely hard-leftists on the council. They are your ideal govt. And yet that woman died anyway. Where is the outrage?

And in light of Stefan's post at 10:48 AM Jan. 15th post, maybe Sims can't get the jobs he wants because those hiring aren't impressed with his performance as KC Exec. (millions wasted on computer systems that didn't work, a horriby run elections department that looks corrupt at times; the culture of fear and loathing that we keep hearing exists in the KCE dept.; stealing land from people via the CAO {with help from the other leftists on the council}, the general incompetence that Stefan highlights from time to time (Like his recent post: "An accuracy rate any bank would envy"). I don't know about you, but I would NOT hire this guy to run our business.

Posted by: Me on January 15, 2007 11:01 AM

24. Sue the County for failure to comply with the Public Disclosure law. As I recall, you can recover attroneys fees and costs in a suit to compell full disclosure. I am confident that you can find competent lawyers to take on the case pro bono.

Posted by: Paddy on January 15, 2007 11:12 AM