Serving the Flathead Valley & Montana since 2006. A reality based independent journal of observation & analysis. © James Conner.
Flathead County’s elections department has posted preliminary returns from last week’s municipal elections — but not in a particularly useful form. The vote totals for candidates are there, for all three incorporated cities (Columbia Falls, Kalispell, Whitefish), but turnout information for each city is not. Instead, there is this:
The 20,375 registered voters and 5,329 votes cast have to be the aggregates for the entire county. These are not useful statistics for describing three independent elections. It just boggles my mind that Paula Robinson and her staff presented this mush instead of breaking out the registered voters and ballots cast numbers for each city.
Another complaint: these data are not made available in a spreadsheet or a standard format such as tab separated text or comma separated values (CSV). Instead we get a page resembling a printout from a mainframe computer in the punchcard era.
Robinson, et el, could and should have done better. Instead, they ill-served the voters and embarrassed the county.
Unfortunately, as Ed Kilgore noted today at the Washington Monthly, sloppy election administration happens all over the country. And it will continue as long as we choose elections officials through the political process instead of hiring them on the basis of professional qualifications.