Comments

1
Your premise is rural, mostly east-of-the-Cascades voters are racist.
2
How about we also stop picking Supreme Court Judges in the Primary?
3
If I understand correctly, it is only election law not the state constitution, that causes these to be decided in the Primary Election. With current filing dead-lines far enough in advance to allow proper ballot layout, it isn't unreasonable to moive contests that currently fit the criteria to be decided in the Primary exclusively to General Election Ballot, and would therefore fall under that Voter's Pamphlet.

Tangentially, it may be time to move the Voter's Pamphlet to an opt-in system, as I imagine enough voters do not use or need a paper copy, that the additional data point in registration records and processing overhead would be more than offset by the savings in printing and mailing.

Lastly, the argument that hyper-partisanship drove votes against Democratic Party appointed Gonzales is not without merit, and including it might help offset the knee-jerk "not racist" condemnations that many, especially unreflective, non-KKK marching racists automatically make whenever the 'R' word is invoked.
4
@1: Eli's premise is based on years of research in which we've seen - over and over again - that the less information voters have the more they resort to bias and prejudice in making their choices.
5
@3: Your first point is reasonable.

As for your second point, shouldn't the default position be more information, not less? Thus, voters should be able to opt-out of a voters guide, not have to ask for one.

Gonzalez was appointed by a Democrat, but was endorsed by Rob McKenna, Reagan Dunn, Dan Evans, and a number of other well known Republicans across the state. He had more Republican endorsements than Susan Owens - who received much more of the vote in rural WA. So what explains that difference if not bias and ignorance?
6
What about this? People who have regular internet access could choose to opt out of getting a printed copy of the voter's pamphlet. That could save the state some money. Only mail printed copies to the people who can't easily get them any other way.
7
As for bias playing a role in this race: this is really an empirical question. In two weeks we'll receive the precinct data from the Secretary of State and will be able to start analyzing the numbers to see if we had racially polarized voting. Given what we know about how people vote, I would be shocked if we did not find that racial bias played a major role in the results of this race.
8
@5 Opt-out might be better, although given the phone-book debates here...

I am comfortable saying racism accounts for some significant portion of the discrepancy. However, I have not spent enough time in the counties in question, to know to what extent to blame bias (against democratic appointees) and ignorance (or endorsements from Republicans), as opposed to other factors including march-in-white-sheet racism.

I also realize we're mostly talking among ourselves, but it is my experience that the most reachable tend to shut off rational thought and discussion if they feel you're calling them racist, and therefore are never helped to examine their racist tendencies and unexamined prejudices. It may be that acknowledging a less socially unacceptable factor as well, may allow more people to consider the issue.
9
@8, what you said there comprises most of the reasons that Dems don't win: we want to "help" people examine their motives instead of giving them a palatable ORDER like the Republicans do. This isn't a group counseling session.

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