Interesting returns Thursday evening. And Friday will not give any, as Shirley gives her staff Veteran's Day off. We salute her respect for our veterans. We can be patient. 51,000 counted and 18,000 to go. Saturday we will have maybe 5,000 more and Monday at 5:30 p.m. we will add maybe 10,000 more, leaving maybe 3,000 for next Tuesday. All rough guesses.

Thursday showed a second count that helped Christina Maginnis close to within 0.04% of Sam Crawford. Both the 2nd and 3rd ballot counts have helped her narrow the gap. Will it continue? I have written about the right shift and it may be about to come into play. Tim Johnson says there is no such thing as a right shift. Yup, right there on Sweeney's blog. Let's see - he calls it "ugly nonsense." No, wait, that's a reference he makes about me.

So - let's see if the right shift is strong enough to favor Sam and Tony with the last 20% of the votes - say on Monday. Why? We can leave that question to researchers after all ballots are counted. It just seems most local races have seen some rural county right shifts late in the counts - even after mail-in ballots became the only way we vote. It no doubt involves political beliefs and how close to election day some people vote.  Right shift does not seem to happen in Bellingham.

Many have complained about the gawd awful slow pace of counting the ballots. Some look for whom to blame. In truth, we have this system because we have not pushed our elected officials to provide better. And after this count is over, we will all forget about it until next year.

There are better ways to conduct an election count than the way we do it in Washington state. Aside from the Secretary of State's computers crashing as they have every year, we also have a system that drags out the process for weeks. Oregon requires ballots to be received by election day. Duh. What a concept.

How else can we improve our election process? How about:

- Prepaid postage for our ballots.

- Distinctive color that mandates faster delivery by the Post Office.

- Better envelope design that is not so confusing to so many people.

- Allow more information to appear beside each candidate and issue.

There are more possible reforms and improvements. But even these few would, I think, improve the election process in short order. Of course the challenge is how any improvements, that all agree are needed, can be forced on elected officials. Then, we must get them to act. When an initiative passes by a 65% margin - after a council and administration and court have all denied a public hearing and tried to keep it off the ballot and challenge its legality - then you can safely assume our elected officials are not responsive.  Consider Seth Fleetwood winning with 65% and no expenditures, and he was the only 'No' vote on the council to the cameras. Given how Barry went down, one can only wonder what the vote would have been if Weiss or Borneman had had a challenger. Maybe an advisory initiative on voting is the way to get some changes made.