Several commentators have looked at the inconclusive results from yesterday's vote and prematurely ejaculated with the baseless conclusion that NO-NO won. See Clowncilman Peter Steinbrueck, or Westneat:
The choices were A or B. You picked "neither."or Times editoral board:
"Double no" means, of course, voters didn't like either choice.Not right. I'll try to simplify my unnecessarily complicated post from last night.
There were 3 real choices: YES elevated/NO tunnel; YES tunnel/NO elevated; NO-NO. The 55% who voted NO on the elevated included the 30% who voted YES on the tunnel. So it was basically:
Elevated 45%
Tunnel 30%
NO-NO 25%
(It's slightly more complicated because some voted YES on both and some cast blank ballots). We can't know for sure, but unless you're convinced that the actual votes for the odd theoretical possibilities won a high percentage, the elevated won a plurality, and the NO-NO trailed.
1. REPLACE the overhead
2. BUILD tunnel
? Was there a question about REFITTING the overhead?
Thanks!
Greg
The best we can say is that the tunnel option is not just dead, its really dead. The elevated option has greater interest, but not yet by a majority of voters. Is there a 3rd, 4th and 5th option too? Maybe.
Posted by: Ed on March 14, 2007 10:02 AMYou say that there were "three real choices," and thus limit your interpretation to which of those three choices is favored by the voters. But in reality, it could be that voters don't support any of those three choices.
[By way of example, let's say there are four candidates running for an office - Smith, Jones, Williams, and Miller. Miller is the most popular candidate in fact, but a straw poll leaves Miller off, and Smith finishes 1st, Jones finishes 2nd, and Williams 3rd. An analyst declares that "there were only three real choices on the ballot, so obviously the voters..."]
I believe that that the majority of Seattle voters are opposed to replacing the viaduct. They are opposed to replacing it with a tunnel, and they are opposed to replacing it with a new viaduct. Right or wrong, yesterday the Seattle voters did not "advise" that the viaduct be replaced. Right or wrong, yesterday the Seattle voters did not "advise" in favor of the disruption and billions in spending that would result from tearing down the viaduct.
Posted by: Steve Beren on March 14, 2007 10:10 AMYou say that there were "three real choices," and thus limit your interpretation to which of those three choices is favored by the voters. But in reality, it could be that voters don't support any of those three choices.Um, okay, Steve, but one of my 3 choices was "no on both". If you believe that voters rejected the tunnel and rejected the elevated and rejected rejecting both, what options do you think they favored that I left out? Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on March 14, 2007 10:21 AM
We really don't know what those 30% tunnel and 25% NO-NO voters would vote for given another option (assuming the tunnel is dead), but we know it's not another viaduct.
Posted by: Palouse on March 14, 2007 10:29 AMThere are a lot of Utopian Seattle Moonbats who have been to San Francisco and seen the Embarcadero. Probably on a visit to walk in a gay parade, or a naked protest or some other such nonsense. These Moonbats come back feeling that a nice surface boulevard in Seattle is akin to what they saw in San Francisco. But they are not engineers, and they are not even residents of the Bay Area, and they don't understand that San Francisco is at the end of a Peninsula, and the Embarcadero freeway was never really completed to become a major North South corridor, unlike the Alasakan Way viaduct which actually is a major North South corridor.
In my opinion, the Moonbat contingent, along with the obvious inability to make money out of thin air, and along with Nickels eventual realization, that a surface street will still win a lot of the high value waterfront real estate battles that he had hope for, will all merge together. And that merge will create a dead end for would be North South drivers.
And this is exactly what the anti-man, anti-car moonbats want.
Prepare for more gridlock. The nihilist anti-man, anti-car moonbats hope to choke the roads so badly, that your car is no longer operable.
Posted by: Jeff B. on March 14, 2007 10:41 AMEven if the obstreperous council had produced a ballot with three clear choices (tunnel, replacement viaduct, and "surface option"), Stefan's logic correctly indicates that the "surface option" would have come in last (the anti-viaduct folks would have split between tunnel and surface), and the replacement viaduct would have won.
It is clear that many no-no votes were cast by supporters of retrofitting the existing viaduct (people whom I assume would vote for a replacement viaduct over a tunnel if that was their only choice to make), so that there is no conclusion that can be drawn from the "No" votes. Only the Yes votes have meaning, and a replacement viaduct won. Any other conclusion is just political spin.
Posted by: srogers on March 14, 2007 10:55 AMMy thoughts exactly. How many of the no votes do you think were votes for the retrofit repair at a huge savings to everyone? Or for a surface street option?
Seems they needed one question with 5 options; the 4 proposals and the none of the above. But of course, making the question and options clear would have eliminated the politicians ability to spin a victory out of the results regardless of getting the most votes or not.
Posted by: MJC on March 14, 2007 11:07 AMWhy don't they just get some big pipes, put them up on supports and have an elevated tunnel? How about we put Seattle on Ebay and get rid the problem for good?
Posted by: pbs7mm on March 14, 2007 11:15 AMOlympia would only tax us to pay to have someone haul it away.
Posted by: MJC on March 14, 2007 11:19 AMwasted effort all around. nothing will change. only more consulting $$ blown. & more search for consensus. and yes, 11 is right on the money.
Posted by: jimmie-howya-doin on March 14, 2007 11:21 AM"Several commentators have looked at the inconclusive results from yesterday's vote and prematurely ejaculated with the baseless conclusion that NO-NO won"
It is , of course, your blog Stefan and you are free to do with it what you wish. But that sentence sounds like the sort of gutter talk a lesser intellect such as Goldstein would use. Perhaps you were reaching out to the liberal readers of the blog to give them a metaphor they could understand as copulation seems to be the only prism through which liberals are able to view the world.
I am certain your world view suffers no such constraint. Can you please continue to make this apparent through your writings?
Respectfully,
PBJ
Posted by: pbj on March 14, 2007 11:29 AM2: to utter suddenly and vehementlyIt's a homonym dude. Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on March 14, 2007 11:35 AM
The ballots are still sitting in boxes.
Re-run them and tabulate according to the full set of choices and associate the choice sets with each voter's vote on each measure.
Might cost less than a million dollars.
Posted by: Bart Cannon on March 14, 2007 11:42 AMThe county has this:
http://www.metrokc.gov/elections/200703/res.htm
But without knowing the breakdown, we all know that the results of the vote is a bit variable.
Does the city have access to the breakdown?
Posted by: reason_plz on March 14, 2007 11:43 AMSee TrueSoldier at #10, with whom I agree. The other options were the retrofit and the so-called surface transit option.
One of the advantages the retrofit would have had in a four-way choice was that the other three options (tunnel, new viaduct, surface transit) all lead to incredible cost overruns, bureaucracy, very increased taxes, disruption, and harm to the business climate - all while not helping the transportation problem.
From the perspective of fiscal responsibility, limited government bureaucracy, and focusing government on solving actual problems, the retrofit is the most reasonable solution, by far.
I may be wrong or right in my support of the retrofit. But we can all agree that the way the ballot proposal was structured, framed, and presented blocked and harmed discussion of this fiscally conservative alternative.
Force people to choose among three ultra-costly and counter-productive choices (new viaduct, tunnel, "surface transit"), and of course one will come out ahead. All while the spin-masters try to rule out consideration of the fiscally conservative approach.
And you're right, the ballot was poorly designed. It should have included other options and should have precluded ambiguous options such as YES on both or NO on both.
But you were wrong to conclude earlier that "The voters said "no" twice yesterday". There's nothing in the results to support that.
Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on March 14, 2007 11:54 AMSomeone could actually inspect the ballots, and see which way the YES-YES, YES-NO, NO-YES, and NO-NO votes are going.
Technically, there are nine options, since there are undervotes/overvotes for each choice -- about 5% undervote on the tunnel and 3% undervote on the viaduct.
Probably a good random sample from the returned ballots would be sufficient for this, keeping in mind that mail ballots get sorted by legislative district in the counting process, and also are grouped based on the dates received in the mail.
So maybe take the first 10 ballots from 100 randomly selected ballot batches?
Stefan, are you up for this? The actual ballots should be considered public records. At least they were in Florida, when news agencies got the November 2000 ballots under public records law to recount to see who really "won".
Posted by: Richard Pope on March 14, 2007 12:07 PM"We need to take a moment, take a deep breath and think about this," said Rep. Judy Clibborn, D-Mercer Island, the state House transportation chairwoman.
Dadgummit or dagnabit or something to that effect. I thought this was an "EMERGENCY" a few years ago.
It is a STATE highway. It has a wonderful advantage of transversing Seattle with limited interruptions (crosswalks, stoplights, train traffic, or ferry traffic). The tunnel option was too expensive and even Seattlites won't pay for it. The Surface option only introduces more interruptions in the traffic flow, creating, rather than relieving gridlock.
Posted by: SouthernRoots on March 14, 2007 12:16 PMIf we assume the tunnel is dead (because it is), what if that ballot had the two options, Elevated Rebuild or Surface/Transit? If 55% of voters (30% tunnel, plus 25% NO-NO) did not want another elevated structure before, how would they vote here? I do not think it's automatic by any means that an elevated rebuild would win that vote.
Tunnel voters definitely don't want another viaduct, so you can assume that 30% automatically votes for Surface/Transit. So the question is, how many of the 25% NO-NO voters would migrate to the Elevated Rebuild option? I do not believe it would be enough to give the rebuild a majority over surface/transit.
Posted by: Palouse on March 14, 2007 01:00 PM118,383 votes counted sofar for not building something
What does it really mean.... how can one interpret the true will and mind of the people through such primitive and vague proceedings? We must divine that there were 189,127 votes counted that really implies they all were in support of ... uh... well, a Royal Flush can be formed 4 ways.
Posted by: Peoples Asphalt Coalition on March 14, 2007 01:13 PMThey could have asked the voters if they would prefer replacing the viaduct with a tunnel at the cost to only the smokers in the state, and that as well would have passed overwhelmingly.
They even could have asked the voters if they would prefer replacing the viaduct with a tunnel at the cost to only those people who voted Republican in the last presidently primary, and lo and behold, it may very well have passed overwhelmingly.
Who is going to pay for the damn thing anyhow? It is those people or their representatives that should determine what is going to be built or retrofit or what have you. I wouldn't trust Stalin County voters to vote on anything, they've proven in the past that as a group they are selfish and stupid at best and only as individuals they might rate a little higher.
Posted by: Doug on March 14, 2007 01:17 PMQuit trying to shove a freeway down my throat.
Im sure Stefan and the rest of you fine folks will come up with new attempts to discredit Seattle voting, while simultaneously trying to shove your own right wing agenda.
Take a car ride in the other direction, we don't want a new elevated, and we sure as hell don't want you out of town Republican bloggers lying about our vote intent.
NO MEANT NO, and that means you pro highway folks lost this round. Will you be back? I'm sure of it, after all God and the Constitution says you get to drive downtown without paying for it with your taxes doesn't it?
Posted by: DaveD on March 14, 2007 01:33 PMBut here's a question for you - C. Gregoire has pushed for that rebuild, and she might still win and "shove it down your throat". Does that mean you won't be voting for her next election?
Posted by: Palouse on March 14, 2007 01:38 PMBut, I think consensus is that the tunnel is dead. Nothing more nor nothing less. Anything else is conjecture.
Except, the Olys have got to rethink their elevated viaduct option a little bit with the high NO vote.
They can and will spin it and will force the City to approve permits. Simple as simple can be.
Posted by: swatter on March 14, 2007 02:11 PM DaveD did we Rep built I-5 into Seattle and then put a building over it so all you had was TWO lanes. 0-: (NOOOOO)
DaveD you want a foolish tunnel BUILD it yourself. Even though I'm sorry to say we can't have it that way because this whole state is going to pay for the next Seattle mess.
Wow, could your math and logic be more wrong?I'm always happy to be corrected if I'm wrong. Do tell us. How is my logic wrong? Posted by: Stefan Sharkansky on March 14, 2007 03:13 PM
A million dollar pissing match between usless and the queen, cheap entertainment.
/disgust.
Posted by: fox3 on March 15, 2007 08:55 PMFirst, you cannot assume that everyone voted on both issues. So, you need to first separate the ballots by those who only answered question 1, those who only answered question 2, and those that answered both. Only then, can you really find out the 'true' totals of the voters wishes.
Second, you cannot assume that everyone who voted 'yes' on viaduct also voted 'no' on tunnel, and vice versa. Because some could have said 'yes' to both. That is the way the ballot was written.
In fact, I suspect more people only voted on what they didn't want rather than what they did, since the 'did' options were limited to two incredibly shortsighted choices.
Only a cross-tabulation of the two questions will give us the correct answer, but King County Elections has denied my request for such data with the insane logic that two separate issues were being voted on. I see it as one issue--how to replace the viaduct, with two options--rebuild or tunnel. Or at least that is how it was 'sold' to voters.
I suspect if the voters were given a better written ballot the outcome would have been different. Such a ballot might look like this:
Question: How do you want to fix SR-99 through downtown Seattle?
Possible Answers, please check ONLY one:
a. tunnel along the waterfront (original proposal),
b. tunnel-lite (the last minute four lane option),
c. tunnel under 2nd ave (which is actually cheaper and keeps viaduct open during construction),
d. viaduct rebuild (widened for more traffic),
e. viaduct retrofit (fix what is there),
f. street-transit (what kind of transit??? not those dreadful still-stuck-in-the-same-traffic-as-cars buses),
g. wait til if falls down,
h. do nothing,
i. none of the above.
Then we would really know the 'true' intent of the voters.
Posted by: scooter on March 19, 2007 12:59 PM