Vote.Vote King County Conservation District Board Member Election

Good Morning Readers,

If you live in King County WA here is your opportunity! Between now and Tuesday February 11 you have the awesome opportunity to cast a ballot via an online portal. to elect a member of the board of the King County Conservation District.

For details of what the King County Conservation District, check out the same link you can use to vote.

King County Conservation District Board Member election link

RantWoman is really intrigued just to know what the King County Conservation District is. RantWoman is also a big fan of anything that makes voting more accessible to more people, more accessible timewise, more accessible travel wise, and of course more accessible technologically. In this case, it would also be awesome to get the turnout above the pathetic historical record of about 1% of eligible voters.

For many voters having something more or less accessible they can do in their homes can be a giant step forward compared to need to travel to the small number of accessible voting locations in King County,  locations for a very geographically large county where one can vote using an accessible voting machine.

RantWoman read the Sample ballot info and was pleased to see the same available in parallel on the actual ballot. RantWoman considers this a great improvement over the visually painful act of flipping through the Voters pamphlet, having RantMom read the voters pamphlet, or flipping through the online pamphlet.

RantWoman also likes that there is an easy Write-in option. Please NO ONE think of writing in RantWoman. This role really belongs to someone who lives in rural King County, not someone who lives in pretty transportation dense central Seattle.

Full disclosure: the process is NOT 100% accessible. For example because of WA State law requiring a signature with a ballot and because of technical issues with both iOS and Android, it will be difficult for some users to produce the needed signature. RantWoman uses both screen reader and screen enlargement. So on a windows machine running Chrome, JAWS, and Zoomtext, RantWoman was able touse her mouse to produce the needed signature. RantWoman notes that it probably does not look a lot like what is on file with King County Elections, but RantWoman left a phone number and email. RantWoman assumes she will hear from King County Elections if there is a problem

Voters also have options to print and mail their ballots or to decide to trust email delivery. RantWoman chose options to download copies of her ballot and then decided for this small demo election it was fine just to trust how the software handles RantWoman's concern about the secret ballot. Voters generate two pdf's.  One is the ballot. The other is the verification information with address, signature if entered. RantWoman did not try to read the verification PDF with her screen reader, but it would occur to RantWoman to check what is readable. RantWoman assumes consistent with what she has observed about mail-in ballots that the email will be processed by doing a verification step and then routing the actual ballot to the counting process.

In previous life when RantWoman could officially see and before the advent of the mail-in only election, RantWoman has toured the King County elections. RantWoman notes the procedure for processing incoming ballots: the envelopes are verified and then ballot is placed into the counting process.  There are lots of controls about who has physical access to the ballot counting process. RantWoman can think of things that might go wrong but RantWoman has enough confidence that the secret ballot is maintained to work with for this election.

RantWoman notes media reports about two concerns:

No, RantWoman does not have less confidence in this process because Jeff Bezos did soemthing he should have known not to do and got his phone hacked. RantWoman would probably control for the possibility of mass phone hacking with some kind of audit process, but this election is a first step.

This election is being run by King County Elections. Most elections in WA are run by the WA Secretary of State. RantWoman is a little alarmed that both incumbent Secretary of State Kim Wyman and challenger Gael Tarleton are simply sounding alarmed and saying this pathway to voting will never happen. RantWoman does not want to understate technical issues, but blanket dismissal of the idea makes RantWoman a little nervous about responsible officials capacity to do reasonable due diligence about considering options.

But never mind all that for now. RantWoman just encourages readers to VOTE, try it out. Post comments if you like.