Filing for 2009 Washington city and county elections closed on June 5. The primary is in August. One incumbent city coucilmember, Janet Way, will probably not appear on the August ballot because she tried to file for re-election online, and had computer problems. See this story. Thanks to Chris Roberts for the link.
The newspaper story says that although on-line filing closed at 4 p.m., the King County Elections Department would have let her file in-person as late as 4:30 p.m. However, that would have meant a trip in rush-hour traffic from her home in Shoreline, to downtown Seattle. Shoreline is 15 miles north of Seattle.
And from the Heart Land:
Funkhouser recall deserve a re-count
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City Clerk Vickie Thompson broke the news to Michael Hart (left) and Michael Pozun, co-founders of the Committee to Recall Mark Funkhouser.
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Funkhouser’s State of the City speech lacks focus, leadership.
Staffers at three separate election boards verified signatures from the petition drive that sought to recall Mayor Mark Funkhouser. They concluded that the effort fell short by 129 names.
With a margin that thin, a re-count is in order.
Unfortunately, in all the years of city governance, no one has seen fit to amend the City Charter to include a process for reviewing the results of petition drives.
The City Council needs to get working on that. But members first must figure out how to make sure the most recent round of signatures was properly counted.
A City Council resolution might be enough to persuade elections officials in Jackson, Clay and Platte counties to agree to a re-count supervised by the petitioners and Funkhouser’s camp.
That would be preferable. It’s in everybody’s interest to speedily resolve the question of who is going to occupy the mayor’s office for the next two years.
A less desirable — but perhaps inevitable — route is through the courts. The stakes are high, and neither side appears willing to give up without a fight.
Funkhouser’s opponents needed 16,950 valid signatures of Kansas City voters to force a special election that would seat a mayor for the remainder of the current term. That’s a high bar, and organizers of the petition drive surprised nearly everyone by coming as close as they did.
Missouri law provides for an automatic re-count if an election is decided by less than 1 percent of the vote. State law, like the Kansas City Charter, says nothing about petition drives. But those, too, are an exercise in democracy.
In the recent Kansas City effort, ordinary citizens devoted hundreds of hours to gathering signatures. Counting those signatures is a mammoth task, and prone to error. People who organized and signed the petitions deserve to see the work double-checked.
Posted on Sun, Jun. 07, 2009 10:15 PM
Kansas City Star [Editorial]/ Donald Raymond Lake
No Way.