Wednesday, July 29, 2020

The Political Desk: Ship of State

Washington Secretary of State primarily oversees the voting, and in the present environment that's a pretty major task. As I mentioned, Washington State is vote-by-mail, so a lot of reponsibility comes down on these shoulders. It is also probably one of the wonkiest offices in the state.

Incumbent Kim Wyman has done a pretty good job, to be honest. There was a major screwup with online voter registration earlier in the year, but they got on top of it and resolved it. And, she has taken a stand by NOT voting in the primary, since to do so would be support the current occupant of the White House, who, by the way, HATES voting-by-mail. In a normal situation, I would expect her to make it through to November. But these are not normal situations. I am saying no Republicans this time out, so I, with the heaviest of hearts, I will pass on her.

Gentry Lange (Progressive) and Ed Minger (Independent) get down into the details in their candidate stations. Lange wants Open Source Software to count the votes, which is interesting. Minger is pushing the idea of approval voting, where you can vote for multiple candidates for the same office, and all those votes count. I think ranked voting is a better idea if you're going to monkey with the system, but that's even more wild than what Minger is proposing. 

The Democrat candidate is Gael Tarleton, who has shown up in various offices over the years. She's big on cyber-security, which is a really good thing in our cyberpunky world. She's actually written the law on some of these things. Moreover, one of her gigs was at the Port of Seattle, which has always been by go-to-spot for reporting on shenanigans. The fact she emerged from that operation relatively unbesmirched is pretty impressive. 

So, yeah, Gael Tarleton.

More later,