Tuesday, 09/14/04

It's primary day in Washington State. The damn political parties got together and mounted a successful first amendment challenge to the open primary Washington had enjoyed for seventy years, so there's no more multi-party voting in primary races. Bah. The gory details (MP3, realaudio) are available if you're curious; I was especially tickled by the Alaskan caller who said open primaries were a bad thing because cross-party voting tends to elect moderates.

The biggest surprise of the day for me is that The Stranger's election guide convinced me to vote for Mark Sidran over Deborah Senn for AG. The Stranger was Sidran's most implacable foe in his ten-year reign as Seattle City Attorney, when Sidran was the furthest-right Democrat west of Spokane. But that's not such a bad thing for an AG, especially one who'll be running against a credible Republican in the general.

The Stranger goes into a lot of detail on Sidran-Senn (end of the first page, into the second page), and the rest of their picks may be entertaining to the politically inclined even if you live out of state. If you're in-state, they're a useful guide to the judgeship races, which are always pretty opaque to me, especially at the primary level. 12:41PM «

Bits pushed by Movable Type