Our new Democratic Senators celebrating!

We’re still holding our breath out here ... Darcy Burner’s race is still far too close to call.

Atrios was briefly all excited that she’d pulled ahead, but it doesn’t seem like anyone really knows yet. How long will it take to count all the ballots? It would be sweet if she wins, though.

What an astonishing couple of days.

It’ll take days…

Not as long as it went two years ago, though.  Only two counties are involved, though they’re the two biggest in the state.

One “problem”, of course, is that we have such a high proportion of permanent-absentee voters; in fact, Pierce County is one of the 34 counties (out of 39 in all) that have gone totally vote-by-mail.  The postmark deadline is Election Day, so they have to allow quite a few days beyond yesterday to receive ballots.  King County received over 75,000 ballots yesterday (none of which have been tallied yet, as they first have to have the signatures verified), and I’m certain that well over 100,000 more are still to come.  The Burner campaign estimates that about 30% of the absentees are from WA-08.

If you click on my dKos compendium and look at the dates (last report from the original count was written on November 19), remember that that year’s Election Day was November 2.  So the counting took 2 and a half weeks.

My son - a confirmed political junkie--tells me that Bolton is going to be handed his hat and shoved out the door, too.  WhoooHooo, that was such a lousy choice from the getgo.  I do not know where he heard it, did not get a chance to ask.  Can Cheney and Rove be far behind.  Ahhhhhhhh, life is good isn’t it....and funny you should mention the weather and yet, how good you felt.  I think we are all going through that.  Was talking to someone last night who was bitching about what a lousy, dark, rainy day yesterday was and I had to stop and think about it.  And then I said, Oh, right, yes, I guess the weather was lousy.  Had not even noticed!! 

Have you heard anything on numbers of voters?  I know it was pretty much unprecedented for a mid term election, but am curious as to how it matched up to a presidential election year?  If it matches up nicely, then there is yet another slam dunk..........right between the eyes!!

Heard Cheney was going hunting this weekend, first time since he shot his friend in the face.  Hmmmmmmmm--and from there maybe back to his bunker?  LOL

N—How many people are involved in the whole counting process? You must have a veritable army installed to do the signature verifying and counting. That’s got to be some kind of eye popping example of organization.

But I also wonder...if this did turn into a miniature version of the Gregoire-Rossi fiasco, would the good people of WA rethink their permament-absentee ballot rules?

Cyn—who do you suppose will replace Bolton? If it’s a 41 era individual, that’ll be a sure sign that Poppy is in charge.

Condi’s going to need some assistance, too. I hear that Zalmay Khalilzad will be looking for a new job in a couple of months. He wouldn’t be the worst choice for DepSec by a long stretch.

I haven’t heard solid numbers for voter turnout yet, but there’s been a lot of talk about way higher numbers than usual.

Oh...Cheney went hunting with his daughter. It would be very unseemly to go shooting her in the face, dontcha think?

Turnout was variable ... ours was high, but then there’s this article and this shockingly low turnout in a too-close-to-call NC race.  Only 120K voters in NC-08??  WA-08 has 150K with only about 60% counted.

Dubya’s trying to get Bolton approved before the Senate switches, but the term snowball’s chance in hell comes to mind.  As a recess appointment, he’ll then have to leave ... good riddance.

As for vote-counting, it is indeed an army of county workers, often temporary hires.  And, after the bleating of the GOP in our 2004 gubernatorial epic, every task is overseen by party reps, adding to the crowd.  All those absentee ballots have to be sorted into precincts.  Then an opscan reader is programmed with that precinct’s pattern of marks and the ballots are individually fed through the reader.  Some ballots can’t be read by the machine—undervotes (left blank), overvotes (two candidates marked in a race), write-ins.  All rejected ballots will go to the Canvassing Board for individual determination of “voter intent”.  When the precinct opscan is done, a paper readout of the precinct vote totals is spit out of the machine while the ballots are put into secure storage.  Then the precinct’s data are entered into a spreadsheet (probably by several clerks on several separate computers, to be checked later for data-entry mistakes).  Lather, rinse, repeat.

If it goes to an automated recount, the entire process is done again.  If it goes to a manual recound, they hire even more people to eyeball the ballots one-by-one.  That entails teams of three people—Democrat, Republican, county employee—who must all agree that a particular ballot belongs in a particular pile.  Any disagreements go to the Canvassing Board.  They count and double-count the piles, record the totals individually and cross-check them, resolving any discrepancies before submitting their results back to officials.  Boxes must come to the counters with intact seals, and go back to storage with new intact seals.  Boxes with results different from the previous counts will probably be recounted more than once, to double-check that the manual count is correct.

Very tedious, very labor-intensive.  I worked on a hand recount from this year’s primary.  There were about 90,000 votes to be counted (about 1/3 of what will be in the WA-08 race), about 25 counting tables (three people at each one), runners to deliver and collect boxes, supervisors and administrators, data entry clerks, etc.  There were also observers from both political parties, from the three candidates involved in the minor race we were recounting, reporters, and the general public.  I was paid for 14.5 hours of work over two days to do that recount.

Our turnout was the lowest ever at 52%.  Most of that can and will be attributed to races for Governor, US Senate and an open House seat which were foregone conclusions.  The latter two were more or less decided in the Democratic primary, and our Republican Gov. was way too popular for the low-name-recognition guy the Democrats found to run against her (particularly when she had a $6M warchest and he had under $750K).

Am I wrong or is 52% thought to be a remarkably good turnout for a mid-term election? It’s not usually *that* much higher, nationally, for a presidential election, is it? (I can’t remember, so I’m recalling impressions, not facts.)

N - you can at least say one thing for your voting process, it really is hands-on and the whole process elevates it to A Very Important Thing with A Lot of Oversight. That’s gotta be good for everyone.

Was Cyn talking about Josh or John Bolton? I thought Josh, but maybe not. I think it’s a foregone conclusion that John is about to be history. Wouldn’t it be great to be a fly on the wall in the oval office right now? I’d love to know if Junior is really going to be compliant with Baker’s wishes. If so, there should be more interesting changes coming down the pipeline.

Here’s a chart of our turnout since statehood.  It’s a blown-up version of the one at the bottom of this story.  It was pretty high until the mid-90s, when it began to fall off to the 60% range.

Linkmeister, I’m really confused by the graph you point to. 

The colors on the bars tell a completely different story than the numbers.  For 2006, for instance, the gray bar for “Total registered voters” appears to match the listed number (662,728).  Multiplying by the indicated turnout percentage (52.6%) gives a vote count of about 349,000, but the blue “Registered voters who voted” bar only reaches to a bit over 200,000.  Every other bar is similarly misleading/incorrect.

Not only that… The graph gives numbers completely different from those in the table near the top of the news story.  In the table, Hawaii’s voter turnout percentages for 2002, 2004, and 2006 are listed as 44.4%, 60.7%, and 36.4%, respectively; in the graph, the same three turnout numbers are reported as 57.0%, 66.7%, and 52.6%.

The table’s lower percentage for 2006 may jibe with the blue bar—36.4% of 662,728 is about 241,000.

Yes, and now that our side has a majority in both houses they should actually USE the subpeona power and launch a REAL independent investigation into 9/11.

One thing that struck me as odd in the days after 9/11 was Bush saying “We will not tolerate conspiracy theories [regarding 9/11]”. Sure enough there have been some wacky conspiracy theories surrounding the events of that day. The most far-fetched and patently ridiculous one that I’ve ever heard goes like this: Nineteen hijackers who claimed to be devout Muslims but yet were so un-Muslim as to be getting drunk all the time, doing cocaine and frequenting strip clubs decided to hijack four airliners and fly them into buildings in the northeastern U.S., the area of the country that is the most thick with fighter bases. After leaving a Koran on a barstool at a strip bar after getting shitfaced drunk on the night before, then writing a suicide note/inspirational letter that sounded like it was written by someone with next to no knowledge of Islam, they went to bed and got up the next morning hung over and carried out their devious plan. Nevermind the fact that of the four “pilots” among them there was not a one that could handle a Cessna or a Piper Cub let alone fly a jumbo jet, and the one assigned the most difficult task of all, Hani Hanjour, was so laughably incompetent that he was the worst fake “pilot” of the bunch. Nevermind the fact that they received very rudimentary flight training at Pensacola Naval Air Station, making them more likely to have been C.I.A. assets than Islamic fundamentalist terrorists. So on to the airports. These “hijackers” somehow managed to board all four airliners with their tickets, yet not even ONE got his name on any of the flight manifests. So they hijack all four airliners and at this time passengers on United 93 start making a bunch of cell phone calls from 35,000 feet in the air to tell people what was going on. Nevermind the fact that cell phones wouldn’t work very well above 4,000 feet, and wouldn’t work at ALL above 8,000 feet. But the conspiracy theorists won’t let that fact get in the way of a good fantasy. That is one of the little things you “aren’t supposed to think about”. Nevermind that one of the callers called his mom and said his first and last name, more like he was reading from a list than calling his own mom. Anyway, when these airliners each deviated from their flight plan and didn’t respond to ground control, NORAD would any other time have followed standard operating procedure (and did NOT have to be told by F.A.A. that there were hijackings because they were watching the same events unfold on their own radar) which means fighter jets would be scrambled from the nearest base where they were available on standby within a few minutes, just like every other time when airliners stray off course. But of course on 9/11 this didn’t happen, not even close. Somehow these “hijackers” must have used magical powers to cause NORAD to stand down, as ridiculous as this sounds because total inaction from the most high-tech and professional Air Force in the world would be necessary to carry out their tasks. So on the most important day in its history the Air Force was totally worthless. Then they had to make one of the airliners look like a smaller plane, because unknown to them the Naudet brothers had a videocamera to capture the only known footage of the North Tower crash, and this footage shows something that is not at all like a jumbo jet, but didn’t have to bother with the South Tower jet disguising itself because that was the one we were “supposed to see”. Anyway, as for the Pentagon they had to have Hani Hanjour fly his airliner like it was a fighter plane, making a high G-force corkscrew turn that no real airliner can do, in making its descent to strike the Pentagon. But these “hijackers” wanted to make sure Rumsfeld survived so they went out of their way to hit the farthest point in the building from where Rumsfeld and the top brass are located. And this worked out rather well for the military personnel in the Pentagon, since the side that was hit was the part that was under renovation at the time with few military personnel present compared to construction workers. Still more fortuitous for the Pentagon, the side that was hit had just before 9/11 been structurally reinforced to prevent a large fire there from spreading elsewhere in the building. Awful nice of them to pick that part to hit, huh? Then the airliner vaporized itself into nothing but tiny unidentifiable pieces no bigger than a fist, unlike the crash of a real airliner when you will be able to see at least some identifiable parts, like crumpled wings, broken tail section etc. Why, Hani Hanjour the terrible pilot flew that airliner so good that even though he hit the Pentagon on the ground floor the engines didn’t even drag the ground!! Imagine that!! Though the airliner vaporized itself on impact it only made a tiny 16 foot hole in the building. Amazing. Meanwhile, though the planes hitting the Twin Towers caused fires small enough for the firefighters to be heard on their radios saying “We just need 2 hoses and we can knock this fire down” attesting to the small size of it, somehow they must have used magical powers from beyond the grave to make this morph into a raging inferno capable of making the steel on all forty-seven main support columns (not to mention the over 100 smaller support columns) soften and buckle, then all fail at once. Hmmm. Then still more magic was used to make the building totally defy physics as well as common sense in having the uppermost floors pass through the remainder of the building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly, as falling through air, a feat that without magic could only be done with explosives. Then exactly 30 minutes later the North Tower collapses in precisely the same freefall physics-defying manner. Incredible. Not to mention the fact that both collapsed at a uniform rate too, not slowing down, which also defies physics because as the uppermost floors crash into and through each successive floor beneath them they would shed more and more energy each time, thus slowing itself down. Common sense tells you this is not possible without either the hijackers’ magical powers or explosives. To emphasize their telekinetic prowess, later in the day they made a third building, WTC # 7, collapse also at freefall rate though no plane or any major debris hit it. Amazing guys these magical hijackers. But we know it had to be “Muslim hijackers” the conspiracy theorist will tell you because (now don’t laugh) one of their passports was “found” a couple days later near Ground Zero, miraculously “surviving” the fire that we were told incinerated planes, passengers and black boxes, and also “survived” the collapse of the building it was in. When common sense tells you if that were true then they should start making buildings and airliners out of heavy paper and plastic so as to be “indestructable” like that magic passport. The hijackers even used their magical powers to bring at least seven of their number back to life, to appear at american embassies outraged at being blamed for 9/11!! BBC reported on that and it is still online. Nevertheless, they also used magical powers to make the american government look like it was covering something up in the aftermath of this, what with the hasty removal of the steel debris and having it driven to ports in trucks with GPS locators on them, to be shipped overseas to China and India to be melted down. When common sense again tells you that this is paradoxical in that if the steel was so unimportant that they didn’t bother saving some for analysis but so important as to require GPS locators on the trucks with one driver losing his job because he stopped to get lunch. Hmmmm. Further making themselves look guilty, the Bush administration steadfastly refused for over a year to allow a commission to investigate 9/11 to even be formed, only agreeing to it on the conditions that they get to dictate its scope, meaning it was based on the false pretense of the “official story” being true with no other alternatives allowed to be considered, handpicked all its members making sure the ones picked had vested interests in the truth remaining buried, and with Bush and Cheney only “testifying” together, only for an hour, behind closed doors, with their attorneys present and with their “testimonies” not being recorded by tape or even written down in notes. Yes, this whole story smacks of the utmost idiocy and fantastic far-fetched lying, but it is amazingly enough what some people believe. Even now, five years later, the provably false fairy tale of the “nineteen hijackers” is heard repeated again and again, and is accepted without question by so many Americans. Which is itself a testament to the innate psychological cowardice of the American sheeple, i mean people, and their abject willingness to believe something, ANYTHING, no matter how ridiculous in order to avoid facing a scary uncomfortable truth. Time to wake up America.

[Lonnnnng list of links removed - Kate]

Enlightenment, at the risk of sounding shallow, try formatting your long list of links so’s you don’t break my blog.

Gee, Kate, I thought you had a spam filter on this blog. 

Ah well. Everyone is entitled to an opinion. 

Just don’t break my blog.

And other rules of proper netiquette.