Key Thief

An employee for a garbage company that contracts with Seattle Public Utilities says he's being extorted after losing a set of master keys that provides access to Dumpsters across the city.

According to a police report filed on October 29, the garbage company employee received a call from a man who told him he'd found the ring of keys and said he'd return them if the city paid him $100. The company is not named in the police report.

"We don't pay ransom," says Seattle Public Utilities spokesman Andy Ryan. "He said, 'no money, no keys' and we turned it over to [SPD]. They're not marked, so there's no way he can know what they go to."

The police report says a detective was able to track the alleged extortionist's cell phone, but police were unable to locate the man.

The garbage company is contacting building managers to let them know that the security of their trash may have been compromised. JONAH SPANGENTHAL-LEE

Key Races

One big fear of the down-ticket campaigns during the November 4 election was that voters would vote for the races at the top of the ticket, get intimidated by all the county propositions and obscure statewide races like lands commissioner, and stop filling out their ballots—leaving important candidates and measures to be decided by a few. Several campaigns even highlighted their down-ticket status in campaign mailers, with slogans like "a top priority at the bottom of your ballot" (Sound Transit) and "vote from the top down to the bottom up" (the Democrats).

So did people choose a president and then give up? Because the jurisdictions for different measures and candidates don't always overlap (Seattle, for example, is a subset of King County), that isn't always clear. However, statewide, about 27,000 more people cast their vote for president than voted in the governor's race. Down the ballot, statewide races like those for attorney general and lands commissioner saw even greater falloff—nearly 168,000 people voted for president but not attorney general, and more than 200,000 had no say in the lands commissioner race. In the three counties included in the Sound Transit district, hundreds of thousands fewer people voted on mass transit than for president. Although that's not a precise comparison (because Sound Transit includes only the most urban parts of King, Pierce, and Snohomish counties), it does indicate that a significant number of people never made it to the bottom of the ballot. ERICA C. BARNETT