Camden: Possible voter fraud not to level Trump has contended

We’re not even close. By a factor of about a thousand.

The study found 74 possible fraudulent ballots cast in Washington. Not for-sure fraudulent ballots, but those that raise enough questions after nearly 10 months of studying data that they are being referred to local prosecutors for further investigation and possible charges.

Of those, 59 are voters who appear to have cast ballots in two states. Another 14 are voters who may have cast ballots in two places in Washington.

The study looked at data, and things like identical signatures. But no one has yet talked to those 74 voters to determine what was going on. That will be up to prosecutors and local law enforcement. Those 74 voters represent about 0.002 percent of the 3.36 million who cast ballots in Washington.

The study has nothing to do with Trump’s Presidential Advisory Commission on Voter Integrity. Washington and the other states — Oregon, Colorado, Maryland and Delaware — agreed before the election to do the study, so it would’ve happened regardless of who won.

Speaking of numbers

The number 50,000 seems to be a popular one in Washington politics these days. It’s a nice round number, pretty easy to grasp, definitely nothing to sneeze at if preceded by a dollar sign or followed by the word “jobs.”

Legislative Republicans had that as the number of manufacturing jobs Washington has lost since 2000, which they said supports their push to reduce the business and occupation tax for all manufacturers, to parallel the break the state’s biggest manufacturer, Boeing, gets.

It’s also the number of jobs reportedly at stake for a second Amazon headquarters, now that the online retailer seems to have decided that like heads, two headquarters are better than one.

Having the same number of jobs show up in two very different places in such a short period of time means it won’t be long before some politician talks about the 100,000 jobs that their opponent or the opposing party has cost the state. Before that happens, let’s take a quick look at each.

Although it won’t surprise anyone that politicians round up, the actual decline in manufacturing jobs in Washington is 47,100 since 2000, according to the state Department of Employment Security. How many of those lost jobs can be pinned on the differential in B&O tax rates is questionable.

After economic conditions, job numbers are affected by a series of competitive factors that include labor costs and the need for efficiencies, which can prompt companies to spend money on automation so they have fewer workers who produce more stuff.

As for the Amazon 50K, those aren’t really “lost” jobs for Washington. They don’t exist. The chance for a Washington city to offer the kind of tax incentives — outside of economic development circles, we’d just call them bribes — as other places is pretty limited.

You can’t blame any elected official or specific political party for that. It’s the way the state founders set up the constitution.