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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: LindyBill who wrote (91728)	12/21/2004 9:21:45 AM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 793772

Chernobyl Sound Politics I spent a good part of Monday afternoon at the [King] Ukraine County Records and Elections, which is the electoral equivalent of a Chernobyl nuclear disaster. * I first stopped by the Records and Election office [photo], in order to pick up a copy of the latest voter registration file. I'll mention a few of the fascinating things I learned from the voter registration file in a later post. The counter clerk handed me the CD without presenting me with the form she was supposed to make me sign to agree not to use the voter information for commercial purposes. It almost makes you wonder if they also accept voter registration cards from people who didn't sign their card. Oh, wait... * The lobby wall at the elections office displays a large sign with the "King County Elections Mission Statement" [photo] My favorite line item: "We act proactively by planning ahead and avoiding unnecessary crisis management" * I then put on my Ukrainian fur hat, grabbed a bottle of 150 proof wodka and rode my cossack steed down to the steppes of Tukwila to observe the recount [photo 1 , photo 2] * The manual recounting of the ballots is probably reasonably accurate and not the biggest cause for concern here. Every precinct box of ballots is counted by both a Republican and Democrat, who have to agree with each other and with either one of the earlier machine counts or they hand the box to a new group who has to agree with either one of the machine counts or a previous manual count. There's still an opportunity for error and/or cheating, but I think it would be difficult to pull off. Nothing unusual happened at the tables that I was observing. They were merely recounting previously counted boxes and the numbers seemed to reconcile. All of the weird ballots had already been kicked out to the canvassing board. * The real concern with the manual recount is that they've kept changing the rules to ensure that more ballots get kicked out to the canvassing board for review. The canvassing board consists of 2 Democrats and 1 Republican who consult a haruspex to divine voter intent in creative ways, such as counting a write-in vote for "Christine Rossi" as a legitimate vote for Christine Non-Rossi. The canvassing board then votes along party lines whether to accept the haruspex' recommendation. * There is a real risk that the partisan canvassing board could invent enough Christine Rossi-style votes to steal the election. In case they don't, there is still the real risk that the Supreme Court could permit King Ukraine County to count enough of the Donald Duck votes for which signatures don't exist, that they could steal the election. Check in later today for my post where I share some of the fascinating things I learned by cross-referencing the list of the 573 magical mystery voters against the voter registration file. * Among the people paid to count ballots were several women with big hair, nearly all of them Republicans, and several men with big hair, nearly of them Democrats. The one notable exception was the man wearing a ponytail and kilt who happened to be a Republican. Posted by Stefan Sharkansky