Zappini

During the primary Tuesday Sept 19th, paid King County Elections personnel worked to switch voters to absentee ballots. These "Ambassadors" stood outside top poll sites, wearing branded t-shirts, and pressed voters to switch.

King County Elections using ambassadors to encourage use of vote-by-mail

King County Elections Ambassadors Program a Success Many Voters Switching To Vote-by-Mail

The press release claims it's not electioneering. King County Elections has and continues to encourage one form of voting over another. I believe it's illegal.

It's also irresponsible government. Per voter, mail balloting costs a great deal more than poll site balloting. As a tax payer, I can think of plenty of better uses for my money. (To say nothing of all the other problems with forced mail voting.)

Why would King County Elections be doing this? Because they're very clever. Any precinct with fewer than 200 poll site voters can administratively be declared a forced mail voting precinct.

Here's the relevant passage from RCW 29A.48.010 Mail ballot counties and precincts:

(2) The county auditor may designate any precinct having fewer than two hundred active registered voters at the time of closing of voter registration as provided in RCW 29A.08.140 as a mail ballot precinct. Authorization from the county legislative authority is not required to designate a precinct as a mail ballot precinct under this subsection. In determining the number of registered voters in a precinct for the purposes of this section, persons who are ongoing absentee voters under RCW 29A.40.040 shall not be counted. ...

So the "Ambassadors" project is just part of the ongoing campaign to phase out poll site voting.

But why is King County Elections so intent to move to forced mail voting?

Because it enables "absentee chasing". During recent Democratic PCO training, reps from the Coordinated Campaign strongly encouraged everyone to switch voters to absentee ballots. The reason given the PCOs is it allows the party to track who has voted. The "absentee chasing" strategy is explained further here.

Statewide and nationwide, both political parties do absentee chasing. It's huge expense to do. Historically, Republicans dominated the absentee ballots in Washington State. Over the years, the Democrats worked very hard to pull even and then ahead.

I have zero doubt that if the Republicans were currently in charge in King County, they'd be pushing for forced mail voting too. Just look at what is happening nationally. Both Republican- and Democratic-controlled areas are pushing for it.

This is not about parties or partisanship. This is about what's right and what's wrong. Forced mail voting is wrong. Elections departments putting their thumbs on the scale is wrong.

Hi Steve Jobs-

Well. Path to 9/11 aired. That's too bad.

I'm not very aware of what properties Disney owns. But I will make it
a point to identify and boycott their products whenever possible.
(For example, my nephews are nuts for Winnie the Pooh.) I'll
reconsider if ABC/Disney takes it all back.

Cheers, Jason Osgood / Seattle WA

---

On Sep 7, 2006, at 10:31 PM, Jason Aaron Osgood wrote:

Hi Steve Jobs-

I'm pretty sure that I won't even consider buying any ABC or Disney
products via iTunes if "Path to 9/11" gets aired. In fact, I'm
seriously regretting last summer's Disney Cruise package.

Cheers, Jason Osgood / Seattle WA

On Tuesday Aug 29th, 2006, King County Elections Services began their "logic & accuracy testing" of the new Diebold AccuVote TSx touchscreen voting machines. King County now has 507 (?) of these machines. There will be one at each poll site.

If you want to see what the fuss is about, the L&A testing stretches 10 days long. It begins each day at the Elections Distribution Center 1215 Fir St, Seattle. I encourage people to poke their heads in and see what's what. It's a cool facility and it's good to get a feel for what's going on.

There really isn't much to report. Sadly.

It's called "logic and accuracy testing". But I'm pretty sure they're not using the same definition of "testing" as I use. Speaking as a former quality assurance manager, of course. The procedure is pretty simple: slap in a memory card, apply some tamper evident seals, turn on machine, put machine in 'test' mode, fill out a ballot (in English, in Chinese, and an audio ballot), reset the machine, run a zero report, and tidy everything up.

At best, I'd call this a "not broken yet" test.

Bev Harris showed up. She asked uncomfortable questions. She's pretty good at that. Stuff like "Do these machines have wireless capability?", "What's the 'magic button' on the side?", and some other stuff. If you want to learn what to do and what to ask, Blackbox Voting has done a fantastic job of putting together the Citizen's Toolkit to help you get started.

There were video crews from KING5/KONG16 and FOX 13. Bev shared photos for how they bypassed the seals on an AccuVote OS optical scanner to get access to the machinery within. That's somewhat alarming. I don't know if anything got aired.

Bill Huennekens, former superintendent of elections, was reduced to shrugging his shoulders and repeating stuff like "These machines were certified" and "We rely on Diebold to explain stuff". (I'm curious what Huennekens' current role is. Everyone was deferring to him.)

I personally think it would be very informative for KC to crack open a few machines and look for extra memory, used parts, wireless cards, and figure out what the mystery button does. If I had Huennekens' job, curiosity alone would compel me to do it. To say nothing of Diebold's history of lies, fraud, and illegal behavior.

Scratch that. Maybe it's just me, but I see it as Huennekens' duty to crack open the machines, perform some due diligence, and demonstrate to the tax payers and voters that everything's legit.

KC has changed the rhetoric from the false "federal laws mandate we use DREs" to "federal laws mandate we have an accessible voting unit a each poll site." I'm told there's even "independence day for disable voters" posters on buses. It's too bad KC didn't spend all that money buying one of the low-cost, proven, and reliable paper ballot-based alternates. You know, something that didn't take away everyone's secret ballot.

Everyone from KC Elections Services is pleasant, helpful, and seems to be working hard. Everyone knows that utterly I oppose the use of electronic voting machines. So I say to the people working on our elections: it's not personal. Most of you have gotten stuck executing really bad decisions. And somehow, someway, we all have to keep this train on the rails.

Two last points.

Everyone, please consider becoming a poll worker. I asked and was told that KC is still 700 people short. Call 206-296-1606. Or file out the form online. (Sorry, I don't know the deadline for signing up.) Nationally, you can start at the EAC's site: Be A Poll Worker.

If you do work as a poll worker, please remember your duty. This story has been circulating: Poll worker fired over touch-screen voting comment. You have a job as a poll worker. That's to ensure that democracy is served on election day. Please save your criticisms for before and afterwards. Not at the poll site and especially not in front of voters.

PBS NOW: Block The Vote

Friday Sept 1st: This week's program, Block The Vote examines how efforts to prevent voter fraud may disenfranchise many minority, poor, elderly, and disabled voters. Segments include
Personal Essay: Democracy in the Deep South, America's 11 Worst Places to Vote, Spencer Overton's book "Stealing Democracy", and others.

Check here for local listings. In Seattle, NOW airs on KCTS 9 Fri 9/1 8:00pm, Sun 9/3 11:30am, and Tues 9/5 2;30am.

Things are goofy nationwide. While most of us have been fighting the secret vote count done on electronic voting and counting machines, there's activities on other fronts. Like the new statewide voter registration databases and new requirements for voter identification.

Fortunately, in Washington State, at this moment, we're doing "okay" on both fronts. There was some recent brouhaha over our voter registration database, which I'll explain below. And we don't yet require voters to show photo ID.

Of course, all that can change in a heartbeat. So remain vigilant.

Like else where, Washington State has a new statewide voter registration database (VRDB) to comply with HAVA. This can be a really good thing. Vote fraud does happen. Things like dead people voting, duplicate voting, and husbands voting for wives. We should take reasonable steps to prevent vote fraud. One step to ensure the VRDB is up to date and accurate.

However. One of the methods proposed to scrub our database was overzealous (silly). What's typically done is you compare the names and addresses with other databases, like the list of felons and ex-felons, death certificates, USPS address change forms, and the DMV.

How you do these comparisons is really key. Normal industry practice is to use a combination of rules (heuristics) and statistics (probabilistic record linking). (We provide this kind of service to our customers, to help ensure patients don't get the wrong medications. So I can go into nauseating technical detail, if anyone asks.)

What our Secretary of State was proposing is using an exact match when comparing against the DMV records. Unfortunately, that would result it way too many false negatives. Data quality is always an issue (e.g. errors keying in names), some people use different names (like a hyphenated last name), and so on.

Fortunately for us in Washington, the Brennan Center did a lot of the heavy lifting on this issue. You can read about Washington Association of Churches et. al. v. Reed . The good people from Whatcom Fair Voting have an upcoming panel discussion, where reps from Brennan will be talking about this topic.

You can also visit Statewide Voter Registration Databases to see what's going on elsewhere. Happily, I just noticed FEDERAL JUDGE PROTECTS THE RIGHT TO VOTE IN FLORIDA: Court Blocks Law Creating New Obstacles to Voter Registration. (Poor Jeb, he just can't get a break any more.)

On this issue of requiring voters to have photo ID, I have exactly zero problem with it if everyone's given photo ID for free and there's some way to accommodate the elderly, disabled, and poor. Maybe by using provisional ballots.

If the photo ID isn't provided for free, then no deal. Because that's a poll tax.