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Category: civics (Page 2 of 6)
Quarter of a million people turned out for the Democratic caucuses on Saturday. No wonder they were crowded and noisy.
That’s including the 10,000+ that showed up in Thurston County. But like our attendance in Thurston County, if you put it against actual voter turnout, caucus turnout is depressing.
In 2007, there were 3,288,642 registered voters in Washington. If you double the caucus turnout to include Republicans (which I think is generous), you still only get 15 percent turnout. That’s not great.
For only the Democratic primary two years ago, over 600,000 ballots were cast.
Obviously, primaries get better turnout than caucuses, but when we talk about caucus turnout, we should compare it to the participation we usually see and not just throw out raw numbers. 250,000 is better than four years ago, but nowhere near as good as we could be doing.
Plus, from the looks of things, we hardly had the capacity to take care of the 250,000 good people that attended their caucuses.
Bad for Iowa, bad for Washington.
Kos:
… this ridiculous process he defends will disenfranchises thousands of Iowans as it disenfranchises millions of voters around the country who would like a chance to vote for their favorite primary candidate but will never get the chance.
To ad insult to injury, only a whopping 6% of Iowans manage to drag their asses out to participate in a given year. Even with an average of 49% turnout (in 2004), young voters can’t catch a break in the media narrative. Yet somehow Iowans get a big fat pat on the back from the media every four years because a few die-hards manage to drag themselves out to the caucus and it makes for great copy and even better economics for the state.
Though, six percent compares favorably to the 2 percent turnout for caucuses we get in Washington.
“It disenfranchises certain voters or makes them make choices between putting food on the table and caucusing,” said Tom Lindsey, a high school teacher in Iowa City. Mr. Lindsey plans to attend this year, but his neighbors include a cook who cannot slip away from his restaurant job on Thursday night and a mother who must care for her autistic child.
In Washington, I’m wondering how long we have to be left defending caucuses and designed low participation.
A post in which the blogger attempts to clean himself of the ickiness of judging eight people who applied for an open city council seat in Olympia.
I spent the last week or so writing eight posts about people that are applying for open council seat, and I’ve come to a conclusion that about half of them shouldn’t be on the council. I also concluded that I’m not worthy to judge and I only hope that the small amount of wisdom I have helped people think about who might be appointed to serve on the Olympia City Council.
And, that if I had applied, I wouldn’t have been qualified to serve. I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have even gotten through filling out the application packet. While I have some strong feelings about how Olympia can write a better budget, even thinking about the city’s compressive plan would have thrown me off.
Maybe I would have written something about trying to open that process up, make it more transparent and obvious, but that would have been a lot like my budget answer too.
Anyway, reading and writing about those applicants made me think long and hard about my own civic life.
One of the standards I used to judge was whether the applicant had served on a city advisory board, which I’ve never done. Those closet I came as an ad-hoc committee on wi-fi downtown. I think we served the council well, but that hardly gave me a deep understanding of any aspect of city management.
So, maybe next time the city recruits for their many advisory boards, I’ll be applying. Not because one day I want to apply or run for city council, but because if I’m so interesting in my city, I should try to be a bigger help.
State Auditor Brian Sonntag is going to hold a televised, teleconference with Washington State citizens. So says the first commenter at the Olympian on this:
How brave of this bureaucRAT . . . “Randomly chosen” participants. How ’bout a few town meetings across the state at your expense, Mr. Sonntag? If you have any balls to do it…
Seemingly pointing to the difference between an event where the participants choose themselves (by choosing to attend) and an event where the participants are chosen at random. Sonntag’s version is more interesting to me.
Daryl over at Hominid Views had a similar experience with Jay Inslee and enjoyed it.
Gov. Gregoire recently finished a series of forums that the Olympian commenter would have approved of (which also included a random panel at another level), but when your main group of participants is self-chosen, I’m wondering if your just getting a room full of axe-grinders.
The difference with Sonntag’s version is that it will be televised, apparently broadening the reach of the project. It would be interesting if they did this twice a year, just for consistency.
Interesting note is that Elway Research is behind this projects as well as the governor’s recent tour.
Chad Minnick is pushing for a city council blog to replace somewhat private city council email communication:
Establish a City Council blog as an alternative to emails. There really is no need for Council members to email privately. The only reason any Council member would use email at all is because we get together just one night a week and email is one of the quickest and easiest forms of communication the rest of the time. But only a small portion of what is discussed is confidential, and that is just matters having to do with personnel, litigation, and the purchase and sale property. There is no reason Council members can’t communicate during the week on a blog. Ideas can be discussed in the broad light of day where every citizen can read it. I have purchased the domain www.MonroeCityCouncil.com and will give ownership of it to the City for this use.
He has a few other suggestions that Olympia has already implemented (such as putting the meetings online), but the blog suggestion is interesting. Olympia will of course let you see each and every email council sends and recieves, you just have to drop down to the city hall each month to pick up a copy of a cd.
A follow up to earlier today, I was poking around trying to find out what the savings were when Thurston County went to vote by mail back in 2005. This is as close to a definitive answer that I could find:
There are obvious advantages to make the switch.
– Cost savings. Wyman estimates the county could save $400,000 in poll-site costs by going to an all-mail election.
So, if 100,000 people voted in Thurston County during each election, it would only cost $41,000 to pay for postage. This is of course assuming the county couldn’t get some kind of bulk mail rate, which is sort of obvious that they would.
Why are we even talking about this, why don’t they just do it?
When Keri and I voted on Sunday night, she wondered why we have to pay for stamps to vote. I repeated my fantasy “If I was running”: I’d mail stamps to likely voters before their ballots arrived.
What if we all just dropped our ballots in the mail without stamps. If we all lived in Thurston County (like I do), seems like they’d get delivered anyway and the county would eventually pay for our postage.
While I’m not totally sure that paying for postage is a “poll tax” (actually going somewhere to vote probably costs something too), the political wisdom of asking people to put a stamp on a ballot is distasteful at least. So says Rep. Williams:
Democratic state Rep. Brendan Williams of Olympia agrees with DeMucha, saying the postage requirement is a poll tax. Williams, who has suggested using state money for postage, also said he thinks county auditors might cover postage using the savings from going to vote-by-mail in 36 of the state’s 39 counties.
A story in the Puyallup Herald from back in May points to the cost, especially since we’re not talking about just once a year in November:
The auditor’s office and school districts are looking at ways to make it a non-issue for voters.
“We’d like to pay return postage,” Cook said, explaining the postage would be part of the election costs.
However the expense may be too great to make it a reality, said Pat McCarthy, Pierce County auditor.
The Puyallup and Sumner School Districts paid $156,000 combined for election costs for the February bond measures.
District officials think the cost of providing postage would be out-weighed by the voter response.
People don’t want to go to the grocery store to buy a book of stamps or go to the post office for a single stamp just to send in a ballot, Cook said.
So what would the postage cost? Assuming we’re talking about full postage, if the 2006 election were held in Thurston County this year, we’re talking about around 85,000 voters. Let’s just say 100,000 for the sake of arguing that free postage would boost turn out. That’s $41,000, which doesn’t sound like very much.
Statewide, the cost would have been just about $864,000 (not assuming a boost in turnout).
False info from Save Our Sonics:
Q. Let’s buy the teams and have public ownership.
A. False: The situation in Green Bay is unique in sports. Leagues have rules to prevent it from happening again.With NBA teams suffering operating losses it is imposible for a team to exist owned by the people in a city. Here, of course, it’s even worse because the City of Seattle can’t find the money to fix potholes, much less cover the operating losses of an NBA team.
Owners like Howard Shultz recover their losses when they sell the teams and that defeats the purpose of public ownership.
Of course that again assumes that the new owner would consider selling and that isn’t apt to happen.
Actually, the Green Bay Packers aren’t owned by the city of Green Bay, but rather individual stock owners. And, while every major sports league in the United States ban non-profit or government ownership of teams, only the NFL bans corporate ownership to prevent stock sales of teams.
But, the NBA totally allows stock ownership systems. Both the Boston Celtics and the Cleveland Cavaliers.
So, what’s stopping anyone from filing a corporation with the Secretary of State’s office and selling stock to try to buy the Sonics. Nothing at all.
Because, some people might think that she’s campaigning.
She’s not raising money, she’s not asking for votes. She’s simply getting out of Olympia and talking to people.
This tour is actually a repeat of a similar tour last year, which strangely didn’t get the criticism of this year’s tour.
Stefan above cynically points out that the governor is bringing along a pollster, but he fails to point out what that pollster is doing. In each city Gregoire visits, there are random focus groups that are talking about government performance.
What this really gets down to is the role the governor plays in Washington. Is she supposed to just sit in her office and talk to her staff? Or is she supposed to get out around the state and actually talk to citizens?
Here’s a somewhat boring episode of TVW’s Inside Olympia about last year’s tour.
Emmett O'Connell
@emmettoconnell@olympiatime.com
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