The state’s new carbon tax – featuring its triggering of emergency auctions to try and slow rapidly rising cap and trade gas costs (which Shift has highlighted) – has consumed what minimal attention the public is willing to give this year to Governor Jay Inslee’s expensive green energy dreams. However, the folks at Center Square have picked up on another element of the far-Left’s plan for making gasoline much more expensive in our state, as the “Washington Electric Vehicle Council (WEVC) is finalizing its transportation electrification strategy for the Legislature to shift the transportation sector from fossil fuels to electricity.”

You can just bet those bureaucratic geniuses at the WEVC will have taken all good transportation options into consideration before issuing whatever regulations are demanded by Gov. Inslee’s largest extreme environmental campaign donors as they push their pre-determined “roadmap to make electric vehicles the default option” and “the new normal.” Read on to see how “the state trucking industry is warning of ‘fatal flaws’ in that plan that could derail more than just the state’s environmental objective” here… Shift, Center Square.

The hacker world has had plenty of fun at the expense of Washingtonians, in large part due to the inability of the Inslee administration to maintain basic security controls over the state’s computer networks (remember all the fun with fraudsters during COVID, which Shift highlighted?). Now the Seattle Times is updating us on how “parts of the Washington State Department of Transportation’s website have been down since Tuesday following what officials described Thursday as a cyberattack.”

It’s nice of Gov. Inslee’s online experts to take time out of their busy schedules to only take two days to update the public on the “major disruptions for anyone trying to track the chronically late ferries or navigate mountain passes as winter approaches.” You can read on to be re-assured that “there’s no indication the attack has spread to other parts of the department’s systems” yet here… Shift, Seattle Times.

Waiting for results to be updated after election night does allow time for the team at Shift to do more research into campaign funding schemes that evaded coverage during campaign season. One such item was buried in the finance reports of school board candidate T’wina Nobles, who is also known to Pierce County voters as an ineffective first-term state senator.

It turns out that her (seemingly victorious) campaign for a new job on the University Place School Board was largely underwritten by the big labor/big Left donors who fill the treasury at the Democrats’ State Senate campaign – to the tune of $24,000 back on August 31. While considering what priority it is that state legislative special interest donors have in school board elections (union dues anyone?), you can check out other campaign funding fun here… Public Disclosure Commission.

Election mischief is not just confined to election day, as activists in the progressive camp never tire of fiddling with the ways we pick our leaders, as Shift has duly noted, in hopes of reducing the impact of thoughtful voters on the process. One move in that direction was called for by writers over at Sightline, the favorite publication of Washington’s extreme greens, calling for switching the timing of all local elections because, in case you have not noticed, “in every city in Washington, a 60-year-old state law suppresses voter turnout.”

The reality the Left is unhappy with is that “state law requires odd-year local elections,” meaning that their less-informed, less-motivated friends get left out of the local leadership decision-making process because of their own choices. If you need a laugh, you can wade through what they call reasoning for such a switch here… Shift, Sightline.

Election office turmoil has slowed the counting of votes, but some larger trends are evident using only the numbers from election night (which usually end up being about half the final vote tally). One such perspective comes from Seattle Times columnist Danny Westneat, who reminisces that “(I)t was exactly a decade ago that Seattle exploded on the political scene for lefty experimentalism” and that its voters “Tuesday were drubbing all that activism in favor of plain ol’ pragmatism.”

Mr. Westneat has been a sometimes critical observer of Seattle’s performative Left and notes how quaint it now seems that one forgotten recent mayor promised: “he would remake Seattle into ‘the most progressive city in America.’” You can read on to see how “Seattle is the most progressive city no more” here.. Seattle Times.

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