Here in Washington, the leftists who run the state are trying to get each and every county to switch to all-mail ballots. Most of the counties in the state have done so, but two of the largest ones have not; King and Pierce (Seattle and Tacoma, repectively).
Just to the south of us, Oregon is all-mail.
King cannot go all mail just yet for two reasons: 1. They’re not able to get the set up yet because of the sheer number of people, and 2. at least a one-third of the county doesn’t trust them after the 2004 Governor’s election debacle.
Yet, the left keeps pushing for all-mail. They misrepresent the numbers of people who already vote by mail and ignore the problems that have been found in the all-vote-by-mail-systems from other places who do it. I have no doubt, now that the state legislature has moved into two-thirds (D) majority territory that we will be quite possibly be voting by mail-only by 2010 if not 2008.
Another problem with vote by mail is that a large number of people don’t put their ballots in the mail until the actual day of the election, meaning it can take up to five days for the elections office to receive the ballot to be able to count it, slowing down the results.
Normally, people on the left who support vote-by-mail ignore this. But sometimes, you can catch them slipping, like Andrew at the EvergreenPolitics blog
Am I the only one who thinks Washington is tallying votes to slowly?
The rest of the country has its results – and it’s not like we’re Oregon with a full mail in ballot yet. Wouldn’t it be nice to know your new 8th District Congressperson? Although I expect that one to be so close, the mail-in ballots will have to be tallied before we know.
They elect incompetent people, then they advocate the slowest vote tallying program, then they bitch about the results.
Progressive America at its best!
Speaking of incompetence, here are some of King County’s greatest moments from Tuesday
Guess which county couldn’t get the pollbooks printed correctly
A King County polling place inspector is here and told me about an odd screw-up today. The pollbooks were misprinted and listed the wrong ballot code numbers. (the printed numbers were all off by 1. e.g. if the pollbook showed code 130, the correct code number would be 129). The Elections office had to call all 500+ inspectors and explain this. No reports yet if this confusion caused voters to be handed incorrect ballots.
Former Washington Secretary of State Ralph Munro when everyone was waiting for results from King County
“Good God, its after midnight.”
Because of the heavy rains some folks were not able to get to their polling places. Sam Reed, the current SoS, made a ruling that people could print a sample ballot from the state website, write “Flood Ballot” on it and turn it in to their county elections office and that it would be treated as a provisional ballot.
Lets just say that someone took advantage of the weather:
I heard a story from an informed source that someone walked into a polling place in Bellevue and stuffed a bunch of “flood ballots” into an Accuvote. They have lawyers looking into this.
Sounds like a Burner supporter to me.
If you click the links, you’ll find that all three of those go to Stefan Sharkansky at Sound Politics
Which is where I also found this story
Even record-breaking flooding in some areas could not deter voters in King County, who turned out in greater than expected levels countywide, leading to ballot shortages in some polling locations.
Although Elections officials expected only a 20% turnout of poll voters, they prepared each polling place with enough materials for a 60 percent turnout. Still, workers in 55 polling places ran short of ballots and provisional ballots for some precincts.
And although the leftists int he comments get snarky at Stefan, they’ll have to kiss his ass in apology, because poster M3047 at the leftwing WashBlog was manning the boxes at one of the polling stations described in the story
Two precincts ran out of ballots. I called the help desk, with our troubleshooter Ian there, when the remaining ballots dropped below 20. Basically I was told we’ll get back to you; they never did.
People who neither speak nor read or write Chinese voted Chinese ballots at my polling place. I called again when we ran out of ballots. I was told by Spider to have them vote Chinese ballots. Somebody remind me again: why is it that we have Chinese ballots in the first place? I also borrowed some ballots from the two precincts which could afford to give up at least 10. I was also told to have people use the AVU. The practicality of this suggestion is disputed by the number of AVU strikers with paper ballots issued instead (not to mention over 50 votes on the AVU).
M3047 also talks about the horrible staffing problems at the polling station, starting out the day one pollworker short and then having HQ call and order the transfer of another pollworker from that station to a different one.
Of course, to keep their Progressive cred, WashBlog will have to forget all of that and delete that post.
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