Jason Osgood, Dem for Secretary of State, Epic Fails

Democratic candidate for Washington Secretary of State graciously came on to Sound Politics to explain his plan for universal voter registration.

Unfortunately for him, his audience was educated.

We challenged his claims, we refuted them, and we exposed him as favoring legalizing voting for noncitizens. Yes, literally.

His plan is to create a massive new database of all information about residents -- and damn the privacy concerns -- that would mark every resident as "eligible" or "noneligible." But there's no data that necessarily tells us whether someone is noneligible, so it would have to assume, given no contrary evidence, that someone is eligible. Which wouuld include thousands and thousands of noncitizens.

Osgood demonstrated many problems, including either not understanding the technology, or deceptively exaggerating what it can do, such as his claim that data errors in his database could be "eliminated" and that it would lead to "utterly eliminating voter fraud." That is, of course, impossible.

And he had no answer to the concerns of recognized security experts that this was dangerous: it would give a false sense of correctness, while creating a giant privacy threat to all residents, by creating this massive new database of all kinds of documents in one place.

I don't think he has a chance to beat Sam Reed, so I am not worried about it. I find it distressing that the Democrats backed him though. Then again, they backed Fred Walser, and on the scale of terribleness, even Osgood pales compared to Walser.