Ron Sims will be taking listener questions on KUOW Weekday today at 10am.
If you have a moment, call or e-mail the program and ask Sims why his Elections Office is wasting taxpayer dollars to examine more than 100,000 unnecessary extra signatures in order to qualify I-24 and I-25 when they could use a random sample instead.
UPDATE: Sims was never asked about the signatures. If you submitted such a question to the program, let us know in the comments.
But the program did include these election-related tidbits:
15:40:
Sims: all-mail ballots themselves are the best insurance policy that you can haveHmmm
Host Steve Scher: and that's why we went to that, right?
Sims: that's correct
A caller named Cyrus expresses concerns about the number of people he doesn't know who would handle his mail ballot and could alter the result.
20:45 Sims replies:
All-mail ballots do one thing really well, they increase the number of people who vote1 ... even with the last gubernatorial election, what the judge finally ruled is that we hadn't given the governor even a greater margin than we gave her. That's what he ruled.I didn't find those words in Judge Bridge's ruling, but Judge Bridges did say this:
Extraordinary efforts are in place to make it easier to vote, but unfortunately, I fear, it will be much more difficult to account for those votes in the future.
What we found surprised us, and runs counter to the claims of vote-by-mail advocates. Instead of boosting turnout, forcing voters to cast their ballots by mail led to a drop in turnout of 2.6 percentage points in the 2000 general election and 2.9 points in the 2002 governor's race.Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 19, 2007 09:45 AM | Email This
While we're at it, couldn't we save taxpayer dollars if we also capped the number of public record requests you can make? Any idea how much that costs taxpayers?
Posted by: Daniel K on July 19, 2007 01:15 PMWhat part of local government do you work for?
Posted by: REBEL on July 19, 2007 01:19 PMThat's a fair question. Why do you suppose the Washington State Legislature chose to write a sampling option into the WAC for qualifying issues for the ballot, but did not do so for counting the ballots themselves?
(Go ahead - it's not a hard question to answer. And the answer is also the answer to your question.)
Posted by: Patrick on July 19, 2007 01:53 PMWhen the RCW, or WAC, or whatever part of Washington State law it is, declares that statistical sampling suffices for petition signatures, that's good enough, by law. The good ol' boys at King County are exceeding the letter of the law, as Stefan says, only as a delaying tactic. And it must hurt them - they could be mailing out party propaganda or funding solicitations during those precious hours.
The law says nothing of the sort about absentee ballot envelope signatures, or voter signatures. In fact, it provides for far greater scrutiny of the signatures and of the credentials of the voters than the good ol' boys at King County are willing to provide.
What a thrill for the Courthouse gang to deprive election law enforcement of hours, in order to provide those same hours to the featherbedding of petition signatures.
Posted by: Insufficiently Sensitive on July 19, 2007 02:00 PM
Congrats to everyone who contributed to get this on the ballot.
You could use that data to find out how much time it would take for KCE to go through and verify signatures to debunk Sims theory of VBM being a cost saving measure.
Posted by: Ken on July 19, 2007 04:25 PM