Thursday, February 10, 2005

A site with REAL info on the WA Governor's issue

Preemptive Karma- which from its painstakingness looks far more authoritative than the nonsense emanating from Sound Politics or whoever they are.

2 posts of interest are worthy of your attention:

This in-depth analysis of Rossi's legal team shows that the usual gang of suspects is at work trying to overthrow a legitimately elected governor.

It's this post, though, that's the definitive story on the WA governor's race.

But where Democrats in a place like Ohio were frustrated by attempts to gain more information from election officials, we have found election officials in Washington to be generally open, helpful and dedicated. Surpisingly this has remained true even in the face of a vitriolic echo chamber and a heavy burden placed on them by the contest litigants.

These experiences are what gives us such a dim view of the way Sharkansky and SP have gone about their campaign. Too often, the charges have been leveled in a careless manner. Unfortunately, what's emerged is a pattern of discovery and accusation, then publication and THEN perhaps checking to see whether the story's right. Corrections are often made grudgingly and fleetingly.

The most visible mistake was asking the postal service about bulk mailing of military overseas ballots, and not asking about the right bulk mail license. With a minimum of fact checking, Carla was able to suss that one out and defuse the allegations. It's not just election stories, either--this week an associate was incredulous that state laws regarding art set-asides on building projects, would cause an unholy 16mil to be spent on art in front of a sewage plant. Apparently no one asked the development team until later, when it was discovered that the set-aside is not calculated on the total development cost, as SP had blithely assumed. SP corrected their error, but not until well after their article ran....

By Sharkansky’s own admissions, he struggled to create a file that he believed would match what King worked with to reconcile their data. But his struggle was futile from the start, which he must have known: King didn’t reconcile their data at the precinct level, they did it voter by voter, pollbook line by pollbook line. How can you claim you’ve done the definitive analysis, when you don’t even have the right file defined? We don’t think you can.


So basically Sharkansky's making lots of noise, but completely full of smelly brown stuff.

Thanks! You are true Americans!

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