New law doubles cost of September primary election
The state’s new primary law will nearly double the cost of a September primary in Spokane County, Auditor Vicky Dalton said. And that doesn’t account for such intangibles as wear-and-tear on elections workers from angry voters.
Dalton estimated last week that the fall primary will cost about $610,000, or about $300,000 more than previous primaries, because of the need to print four ballots for each voter, rent lockable bins that will collect three of those four ballots and hire a staff of phone workers to answer the inevitable flood of calls from voters wondering why they can’t vote the way they always did in the past.
Voters will get four ballots – one Republican, one Democrat, one Libertarian and one non-partisan – either in the mail or when they walk into the polling place. All of the ballots will have the nonpartisan races like the judicial seats, and each partisan ballot will have only that party’s candidates for each office. (Or, in the case of the Libertarian Party, it will have the office and a blank space for a write-in for most offices because the Libertarians are unlikely to field a full slate of candidates up and down the ticket.)
The ballots won’t be color-coded with the system announced last week by the secretary of state. Color is too darned expensive, Dalton said. Each party gets the same basic white.
Absentee voters can pick the ballot they wish to mark and dispose of the other three in the privacy of their home. Poll voters, however, will be handed all four and instructed to put the three they don’t want to mark in a locked bin. That way their choice of party (or nonparty) remains a secret.
The bins are being rented from King County, Dalton said. The unused ballots will be kept secured until later, when they can be destroyed, which is admittedly a terrible waste of good paper. But it could be worse. Counties with high percentages of non-English speaking residents must also print extra ballots in that language. So Yakima County will have ballots in Spanish, and King County will print ballots in Chinese.
Voters will mark the remaining ballot and run it through the scanner. Then a certain number of them will complain about why they can’t vote the way they have all their lives (or at least since 1935 – there are some centenarian voters who probably remember the old days.)
Dalton is hiring extra phone operators to handle the calls. She thought about printing up fliers with the pictures and phone numbers of state legislators and handing those to voters who don’t like the new system. But that might be considered electioneering, which is illegal in or around a polling place.
But maybe there’s a selling point in all this: Folks who cast a ballot in this year’s primary might be able to tell their grandchildren they voted in the only one of its kind in state history. If enough people are sufficiently steamed, the law could be changed by an initiative in November.
Help from the wives
In yet another sign that Washington is a battleground state, the Democrats and Republicans are enlisting their top-tier surrogates for campaign events this week. First lady Laura Bush is hosting a fund-raiser for George Nethercutt’s senatorial bid in Washington, D.C., on Monday evening. Her husband encouraged Nethercutt to run, and she offered to help.
Not to be overshadowed, Democrats are bringing Teresa Heinz Kerry to Seattle next Friday for a rally that will help raise money for Gov. Gary Locke’s Victory Fund. They’re hoping to pack the State Convention and Trade Center to raise money for the state Democratic Central Committee.
Something to kick about
Here’s our nomination for the most annoying trend of the 2004 campaign season: the “kickoff” event weeks or even months after the candidate has actually “kicked off” a campaign.
It happened again last week when Spokane County Commission candidate Todd Mielke held a campaign kickoff breakfast at the Ridpath for more than 300 people. It featured the standard fare of scrambled eggs, bacon, muffins, pleasant conversation among politically compatible people and requests for money. Nothing wrong with that.
But let’s get real. Mielke announced his campaign two months ago and has signs up all over the county. Rep. George Nethercutt had a similar event in May, nearly a year after he announced he was running for the U.S. Senate seat.
And this isn’t just a Republican thing. Sen. Patty Murray, who has been running for re-election longer than Nethercutt’s been running to unseat her, is having her kickoff swing through the state in late July or August.
Why call these events kickoffs, other than it sounds better than “my current opportunity to hit you up for money”?