King County executive Ron Sims tried to whitewash the election mess again and got busted:
After Sims praised the county’s “99.98 percent” accuracy in handling votes, he was asked what that number was based on. Logan said it was based in part on a discrepancy of 1,800 between ballots counted and voters known to have voted.
However, when that discrepancy was compared with the nearly 900,000 votes counted, blogger Stefan Sharkansky pointed out to Logan, the accuracy rate was actually 99.8 percent.
Sometimes it takes a blogger to do the math. Sims claimed his accuracy would have made a bank happy, but Sharkansky pointed out that it amounts to an error of $2000 for every million counted, not so good in fact.
Isn’t it odd that we can bring democracy to Iraq but not to Seattle? In Iraq, we only had to defeat Baathists and terrorists, but in Seattle we have a Democratic Party machine to cope with.
See Sound Politics for more.
And of course, see Preemptive Karma (linked on my site) et al. to see why Sharkansky’s all washed up on this point.
Any web site with “karma” in its name can’t be credible, it’s the law, and that one is especially credulous.
Come now, Richard..the best you have is “any website with ‘karma’ in it’s name can’t be credible”?
The 98.8% by Sims is absolutely correct. Further, the voters list and the ballots list come from two different processes. They’re never intended to reconcile. Ask an auditor.
Your buddies over at SP have completely bungled the math and the perspective on this issue. And now that they’re losing ground in the media due to the way they handle business…they’re squealing.
Simple fact checking has proven them wrong repeatedly.
Uh, carla, Sims didn’t say 99.8, he said 99.98. So if you believe 99.8 is correct, you don’t believe Sims.
And if the number of votes and the number or voters isn’t meant to be reconciled, why bother to count? The only fallacy in doing this is that we can expect the number of voters will generally exceed the number of votes for any given office because not everybody votes in each race. In Spokane County we saw this sort of a pattern.
But we should never have more votes than voters unless there’s fraud. In King County we saw this sort of a pattern.
This would be a good time to practice your reconciliation skills.
You’re right..it’s 99.98. I misquoted. Sims is correct.
Why bother to count? Are silly rhetorical questions your forte’ or do you have something else to bring to the table?
Could you please provide the Washington statute that says that reconciliations must reach a zero balance in each county for the election to be legitimate?