elections Was: RE: [Gslug-general] REMINDER: Next Meeting is February 9th, 2008 (This upcoming Saturday)

[Ken Meyer]

Fred et al --

Much as I'm apprehensive about being flamed for OT excursions for more than
a hit-and-run moment, but considering the good citizenship of all
Linux-heads, I can only observe that the parts of my message concerning
selecting a party on the primary ballot and being on the "honor system" were
right off the KING 5 evening news, for whatever that's worth.  Caveat
Emptor~

Yes, I'm ready to swear an oath -- in fact a number of them, at the poo-bahs
of both parties.

We thank you for your service to the process of finding caucus locations.

Ken M.


-----Original Message-----

From: gslug-general-bounces at gslug.org
[mailto:gslug-general-bounces at gslug.org]
On Behalf Of Fred Morris
Sent: Friday, February 08, 2008 2:02 PM
To: GSLUG General

Subject: OT: elections Was: RE: [Gslug-general] REMINDER: Next Meeting
is February 9th, 2008 (This upcoming Saturday)

On Friday 08 February 2008 13:42, Ken Meyer wrote:
> [...]
> Listen, this system is so stupid.  Here's more:
>
> On the primary ballot in this state, you are REQUIRED to list a party
> affiliation, and over 25% of the mail-in ballots sent in so far have been
> invalid because this was not done.  Silly us would assume that this would
be
> obvious by who we voted for, unless we tried to vote for someone in both
> parties.  The idea is probably to try to dissuade people from doing the
> cross-over dance, i.e. an R who assumes that McCain has it "in the bag"
and
> doesn't need any help could vote instead for the D who he or she thinks
that
> it would be easiest for McCain to beat.  But of course, this is all on the
> "honor system", and we know how that works.

I was surprised to find out that apparently there was a WAC or RCW change
last
year for the primary election that you didn't have to mark a Party
preference
to get your vote counted in the partisan portion of the ballot. They didn't
tell us this at pollworker training, and as far as I know it wasn't in any
of
the materials. I found out about it because there were some primary races
were one of the primary candidates got more than 100% of the declared
partisan vote in certain precincts in King County.

But this is *not* a "normal" primary election.

You're supposed to swear an oath to one Party or the other. The Parties get
the names of the people who so swear; that's why they won't count your vote
if you don't so swear.

> Speaking of the honor system, you are also not supposed to caucus with one
> party and then choose the other in the primary.  How will they cross-check
> that you don't do so?  They won't.

They might very well. It will be up to credentials committees. If it happens
any challenges will happen long after the parade of talking heads who are
reporting the results have left the state.

It's going to be an interesting summer!

ObLinux: This is Perl+MySQL+Linux http://devil.m3047.inwa.net/elections/

--

Fred Morris
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