How dare they question valid names and signatures!!

After redefining myself, my pronouns are they/him/we and we are definitely a Robotic Megalord Starcruiser!!

Maybe it was the address being in the tunnel under I-5?

I see that the Sawant Solidarity campaign makes regular purchases from Amazon, just like every past Sawant-related campaign:

http://web6.seattle.gov/ethics/filings/popfiling.aspx?prguid=563DB364-FBA6-446B-9A47-7B80645B4A50

You'd think the campaign would make an effort to purchase from vendors within District 3, but I guess they value convenience over supporting the community.

Also of interest: 41% of the Recall Sawant contributions come from within District 3: http://web6.seattle.gov/ethics/elections/charts.aspx?cycle=2021&n1=contributions&n2=district&n3=ballotissues&n4=ballotissue&n5=campaign737&n6=amount#aChartTop

But only 19% of the Sawant Solidarity contributions originate in District 3, with the vast majority of contributions coming from outside of Seattle: http://web6.seattle.gov/ethics/elections/charts.aspx?cycle=2021&n1=contributions&n2=district&n3=ballotissues&n4=ballotissue&n5=campaign740&n6=amount

Man, even living in Portland and with nothing heavily invested in the outcome either way, this story fuckin' rules. I hope that Tim Eyman gets involved.

@2 Did you notice that Kshama has more donors from D3? Just checking. Because, you know, elections are about who has more absolute support, measured by 1 vote per person. Not by the amount of money someone has to donate to PACs, or the amount of weirdly provincial "we're the real seattleites" messaging they do.

I hear Sawant is a socialist, too. Yikes!

Sawant's campaign cannot affect the timing of the recall election, and it's sadly unsurprising The Stranger will not admit this simple fact. The Recall Sawant campaign decides what signature sheets to deliver and when. They say they want to do so sooner rather than later, which befits the logic of a recall election: a recall should be done at the next opportunity, rather than waiting in the hope of getting a more favorable electorate.

Given that the Sawant campaign cannot actually accomplish their stated goal (timing the election in their supposed favor), the next question to ask is what they might actually be trying to do. Perhaps they just want to appear proactive, or perhaps they want to submit invalid signatures, either part of an attempt to scuttle the recall (as they have already tried and failed to do in court) or just to annoy opponents whom they have found frustratingly unsmearable. Perhaps they're trying to increase their own mailing list. Or maybe they're collecting signatures with the intent of not submitting them at all, in the hopes that most signers won't sign two different sheets. That last would be the closest thing to "voter suppression" either campaign can do, and the Recall Sawant campaign is right to suspect it.

The Sawant campaign has great reason to want the recall to appear in the next general election, instead of a special election. In the 2019 primary election, Sawant received less than 40% of the vote, a truly miserable performance for a multi-term incumbent with huge name recognition. In the general election, she set the all-time record for campaign expenditures in a City Council race, and eked out a victory by less than 4%. That also wasn't a great performance, but a win's a win.

@8:

Sawant is betting that the recall campaign will put themselves in an obvious lose-lose position.

If Sawant and her supporters provide enough valid signatures (which would of course need to be verified) by the deadline to put the recall on the November ballot and the recall campaign fails to do so, then they lose the optics, because it will only confirm Sawant's contention they want to wait for a primary election with a traditionally lower voter turnout in the hopes most of her supporters won't show up; and which will only give them more incentive TO show up. OTOH, if they DO present the petitions in time to get on the November ballot in order to NOT look like they're trying rely on a lower voter turnout, they risk the same situation, namely, that a large number of Sawant supporters will show up and vote against the recall.

@9:

If they were buying more expensive stuff elsewhere you-all would complain they were squandering people's hard earned money. Hell, you wouldn't be satisfied unless Sawant and her staff were cutting down trees (at which point you'd shout about "environmental carnage" even though you don't believe in that), turning the wood into pulp, pressing their own paper, making their own ink out of vegetable dyes, building their own printing press, and hand-delivering every missive on-foot, because in your black-and-white binary worldview, no Socialist should ever be utilizing the tools of our oppressive Capitalist system ever, for any reason whatsoever.

All the while you sit on your fat ass ordering shit online, cuz only you and people who think like you are allowed to do that...

@11: First, the Recall Sawant campaign has already stated they want her recall to appear on the general election ballot in November. If they are sincere in that, then they are already risking your second scenario, and Sawant's campaign has accomplished nothing.

Second, prior to the verification of signatures by elections officials, there is no way to know if anyone provided enough valid signatures. That verification takes place after the signatures are submitted, so your first scenario cannot happen.

@12: "...his fundraising dwarfed her own record-setting fundraising and she won anyway."

Wrong. Orion spent $403,881.93; Sawant spent $587,130.43. (https://www.pdc.wa.gov/browse/campaign-explorer/candidate?filer_id=ORIOE%20%20122&election_year=2019 and https://www.pdc.wa.gov/browse/campaign-explorer/candidate?filer_id=SAWAK%20%20102&election_year=2019) She outspent him by almost two hundred grand to win by less than 4%.

You're also free to read the King County Elections results for 2019 and see if what I stated was indeed accurate. Go ahead, give it a try. Let us know what you find.

@15 that is my mistake, i had found reporting on the pac that threw its support behind Orion and misunderstood that their money was split between multiple races. i still don't quite understand the crunchy logic behind your conclusions.

@15 actually, on looking again, the pac support is listed under "Independent (3rd party) expenditures", yes? suddenly i understand why pacs are disliked. looks to me like my initial assertion that vastly more money was spent on Orion was correct, quibbles about whether it was the campaign that actually spent that money aside.

@14, @16: I already speculated Sawant's campaign may be trying to expand their mailing list, and one big purpose of a mailing list is to "engage the electorate."

Their signature gathering is also an implied admission of failure of their "decline to sign" campaign. There may be just too many voters in District 3 who want her gone.

Politically smart for the Sawant campaign to gather as many valid signatures as possible~ and after the deadline, burn them all.

This is such a bizarre story. Sawant has spent the last six months telling us that this Recall is a hundred different awful things (none of which were true). It was racist, it was right-wing, it was the death of democracy, it was fascist, etc.

Now she's going to go around trying to get people to sign the recall? I'm genuinely curious what her motive is. Knowing her, I'm sure it's something sleazy, nefarious and most likely illegal.

She claims it's for some technical reason involving ballot timing. As others have pointed out, that's clearly a lie. So what is the actual reason she doesn't want to admit?

Perhaps it is, as the Recall Sawant campaign suggests, that she wants to collect ballots only to throw them in the garbage.

Perhaps she wants to confuse people by "asking them to sign" but then using that as an opportunity to launch into her campaign argument. Could work if they disguise themselves so people think they're working for the Recall campaign.

Perhaps she just wants to be able to say "the Recall campaign wouldn't even have made the ballot without my help" or some other momentum-stealing move.

I'll have to go walk by her home base in front of Trader Joe's and see how they sell it.

If anything she is giving the Recall campaign a reason to delay turning in signatures so they can shoot for the Feb special election. Ask yourself, would you trust any of the sheets turned in by the Solidarity Campaign? Hell to the no. I'd verify each and every one of them before they are turned in by reaching out to the those signers. So basically the Recall campaign can just say the extra effort created by Solidarity has caused them to miss the deadline. If Sawant was serious about this effort she would have just told her acolytes to encourage people to sign but not actually collect the signatures themselves. I don't think she is really serious though and would suspect she is trying to cast doubt on the Recall movement by muddying the waters.

Regardless the thought that having the election in Nov vs Feb is somehow suppressing the vote is a ridiculous claim. Since we vote by mail everyone is going to be mailed a ballot and all they have to do is fill in the little bubble and send it back. If anything that will be even easier in Feb assuming that is the only question on the ballot. If her supporters are near as numerous as she claims they should have no problems getting people to simply mail a prepaid envelope.

@25: "Perhaps it is, as the Recall Sawant campaign suggests, that she wants to collect ballots only to throw them in the garbage."

Sounds terribly illegal.

"#putuporshutup"

So when 60% of her constituency won't vote for her, if they can't unseat her she'll tell them to shut up rather than listening to anyone she represents who might disagree with her. A pretty good window into what a petty and awful human being she is, this is exactly how San Francisco turned into what it is now.

@25, @26: Another idea behind the Sawant team's actions might be to wait until Recall submits all signatures, then have Sawant flip her rhetoric back to recall being an endless, unmitigated evil. All of 'her' signatories then demand their names removed, in the hope this will jam the process. This would work only if the Recall Sawant campaign was foolish enough to rely upon the Sawant signatures to reach the numerical requirement, and while that seems highly unlikely, the Sawant might actually be desperate enough to hope for this.

As noted, the only practical effect of the Sawant team's meddling may be to give Recall team an excuse to wait past the November election.

@32: "It’s weird how you simultaneously claim to never shop there as a virtue but then claim there is nothing bad or harmful about Amazon’s model."

Um, the point here is that CM Sawant constantly describes Amazon as bad, yet her campaigns repeatedly purchase items there. (Have they no interns or volunteers who can run out to a local store?)

Also, guesty has not here claimed not shopping at Amazon is a virtue, nor that there is 'nothing bad or harmful' about Amazon's model. He merely noted he does not shop at Amazon. (He was responding to your "everyone does it" excuse, which you actually seem to believe constitutes some kind of argument.)

I think it's grand you can nitpick another commenter to such a lengthy degree, whilst flatly ignoring CM Sawant's campaigns' blatant hypocrisy, which is where this dialog began.

@34: That's grand, considering your repeated bashing of guesty for statements he clearly did not make. If you have no problem with CM Sawant's blatant hypocrisy re Amazon, then why did you get so upset at anyone for noting it?

@36: "That must be why she said she specifically never shopped at Amazon."

That was a direct response to your "so does everyone else" excuse @6 for Sawant's blatant hypocrisy, which you still seem somehow to believe constitutes a counter-argument. So guesty claimed (as many persons can truthfully can) never to shop at Amazon. You then groundlessly called guesty a liar, and then attacked guesty for statements guesty clearly never made. All the while yelling about fallacies allegedly committed by other people.

Look, I get it: your flat denial @10 notwithstanding, you're hugely bothered by someone (and it wasn't even guesty! -- see @2) calling out Sawant on her naked hypocrisy. Instead of just admitting, as guesty did say @17, that Sawant is merely another hypocritical politician, you yell at other commenters, call us names, imply we're not thinking, etc. Do you really think you're fooling anyone? (Also, "Tu Quoque," is not a magical incantation which wards off charges of hypocrisy.)

If a person can easily purchase everything wanted without using Amazon (and I know I can), then I fail to see how some government somewhere saying "Amazon is a monopoly" means anything.