I guess it is too much to ask for in this country of 300 million to have a few people running for office, in either party, who can play by the rule of law:
Washington state has supplanted Florida as the leading example of the need for election reform. The Evergreen State’s voting system is so sloppy that you can’t tell where incompetence ends and actual fraud might begin. Three Washington counties just discovered 110 uncounted absentee ballots–including 93 from Seattle’s King County–in a governor’s race that occurred more than five months ago and was decided by only 129 votes. Officials in Seattle’s King County admit they may find yet more ballots before a court hearing next month on whether a new election should be called. Last Friday, they reported finding a 111th ballot.
The infamous 2004 governor’s race was finally decided seven weeks after the election, after King County officials found new unsecured ballots on nine separate occasions during two statewide recounts. After the new ballots were counted, Democrat Christine Gregoire won a 129-vote victory out of some three million ballots cast. Even as she was sworn in last January, King County election supervisor Dean Logan admitted it had been “a messy process.”
He wasn’t kidding. During the two recounts, Mr. Logan’s office discovered 566 “erroneously rejected” absentee ballots, plus another 150 uncounted ones that turned up in a warehouse. Evidence surfaced that dead people had “exercised their right to vote”; documentation was presented that 900 felons in King County alone had illegally voted and that military ballots were sent out too late to be counted. A total of 700 provisional ballots had been fed into voting machines before officials had determined their validity. In the four previous November elections, King County workers had never mishandled more than nine provisional ballots in a single election.
If you want to create apathy in the electorate, this is a good step.
Kathy K
Judging from the time you posted this, and the number of comments since then, I’d say you are right about apathy…
Ross Judson
The question is, what to do about these kinds of things. Sending election officials to prison seems harsh because the environment is inherently political and that will inevitably taint the judicial process.
A LIFETIME ban from ever participating in electoral mechanisms, other than as a voter, seems very appropriate to me, though. Do this regardless of whether there appears to be fault. Once X votes are fucked up within a given election, all those at the top get the boot, regardless of affiliation, experience, or whatever.
Do we need to start worrying about losing experience at the top of election committees? ;)