Last July after County Councilmembers Dunn and Ferguson introduced a proposal to elect the Elections Director, elections office staff went into full bore campaign mode to shoot down the proposal, by, as they often do, distributing incorrect and/or misleading information to the news media. Spokeswoman Bobbie Egan sent this e-mail to KOMO-TV reporter Bryan Johnson:
Just got information on New York City who appoints their top elections chief.In reality, elections oversight in New York City is very different from King County. It has a board of 10 commissioners, 5 recommended by each major party and approved by the City Council. Other large counties around the country use a variety of structures to govern elections, some elected officers, some appointed bipartisan commissions, some officials appointed by various elected officials. But among the top 50 counties (or cities, where elections are run by a city), King County is one of only 5 jurisdictions where the elections director is appointed by the Mayor or County Executive. And in three of the others -- Miami-Dade, Milwaukee and Boston -- there have also been significant election scandals. It's reasonable to anticipate that when elections are treated as just another function to be buried under layers of bureaucracy in the executive branch, then accountability and performance will suffer.Of the top 20 largest counties in the nation, 14 of 20 counties appoint their top elections official.
Egan was also wrong when she claimed that Maricopa County (Phoenix), Arizona appoints its elections director. Maricopa County Recorder Helen Purcell is elected. Egan caught the error and sent a prompt correction to Johnson at the time, but a month later the error resurfaced when it made its way into a draft letter-to-the-editor that Ron Sims was writing to the P-I to argue against the Dunn/Ferguson proposal. This e-mail chain shows the number of election office and other county employees involved in correcting the details in Ron's letter. If only the elections office spent as much effort getting the details right when they administer an election!
Elections Director Jim Buck also spent some of his work time composing arguments against the elected auditor proposal.
Examples of elections governance in other counties is only one part of answer to reforming elections administration in King County. The fact remains that having an appointed elections director hasn't worked out very well here. Indeed, it's precisely because the elections office is appointed by the Executive that the office could be commanded by the Executive to divert its attention from preparing for the Primary to doing something entirely inappropriate for an elections office to do: crafting partisan political statements about an issue that was expected to appear on the ballot.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at May 24, 2007 04:39 PM | Email ThisI think they should just let the voters decide, and abide by it. I mean, don't the taxpayers pay their salaries????
Someone else posted on another thread that just because they are appointed, doesn't mean they are qualified. (Dean Logan set a fine example didn't he) Ran when the gettin was good. Or just maybe he was "asked" to leave, we will never know.
Posted by: Chris on May 24, 2007 05:34 PMI suspect Seattle's MSM reported on this pretty much as a word for word regurgitation of Egan's and Bucks' talking points.
Does anybody have access to archives?
Posted by: huckleberry on May 24, 2007 05:44 PMThe bottom line is, Ms. Egan and her cronies have become very adept at twisting statistics to mean whatever they want them to mean at that moment, not in presenting the honestly in clear light of day.
Posted by: Voter on May 24, 2007 06:08 PM