Crossposted at
Preemptive Karma
Stefan Sharkansky apparently wants to know my name. This in lieu of actually being able to defend his sloppy work and lack of fact checking. As I was reminded today..ad hominem attack is "...the last refuge of a scoundrel." And so it is.
Even after being resoundingly refuted on this blog here and here in his attempts to claim military ballots in King County weren't sent out on time, Sharkansky trots the old saw out again. Presumably if you hear a lie enough times....
(more after the jump)
Today's Seattle Times article "Official disputes gubernatorial vote-tally assertion"
David Irons, R-Sammamish, said yesterday that in the 2000 general election the discrepancy between the numbers of ballots cast and voters credited with voting was only 17 -- far less than the 1,230-vote variance that election officials are citing.
Fact check: Former King County Elections Superintendent Julie Ann Kempf says 17 is the correct number--for 1999. And Kemp was fired in January 2003 after then-Elections Director Bob Roegner accused her of lying about the late mailing of absentee ballots in the 2002 general election.
And the sloppy Sharkansky work doesn't end there. Sharkansky breathlessly claims that King County hasn't proved they mailed the ballots on time despite Keith Ervin of the Seattle Times seeing the logs and verifying they were mailed out on time. And in the next sentence, Sharkansky tries to soft peddle:
I'm not asserting that I know that the ballots were not mailed out on time, only that four months after the fact, the county is unable to provide the documentation that the ballots did go out on time. Stonewalling a County Councilmember is not going to help them make their case.
I guess actually showing the logs to the media doesn't count, eh? That would seem a lot more accurate than claiming they were mailed out with the wrong bulk mailing permit without bothering to check with King County as to how they mail the ballots. But then perhaps the Seattle Times isn't in business to throw stuff against the wall and see if it sticks.....
Torrid Joe does the heavy lifting to fact check Sharkansky one more time:
If King in fact did not trim the "courtesy credits" from their discrepancy total when reporting in 2000, on a comparable basis the error from 2004 is undoubtedly larger. But is it yet an anomaly? Sharkansky's detail of King's discrepancies since 2000 shows an error rate of .16% in 2003, after the time Logan claims the County stopped including courtesy credits in their totals. That would be roughly analagous to the .21% for 2004, especially when you note that the number of ballots cast was over twice that of 2003--
Damn those pesky facts.
And finally, back to the "name controversy" a la Sharkansky:
I welcome anybody who engages in a serious debate and discusses real issues. Hopefully, writing under his real name would inspire him to raise the bar and actually engage in serious debate and bring some new information to the table, instead of simply spouting the baseless nonsense that he (TorridJoe) currently trafficks in.
Curious. It hasn't made Stefan engage in serious debate or bring new factual information to the table in significant doses.