voting Archives - Page 11 of 13 - Ramblin' with Roger

August Rambling: Deep dark secrets

I wrote this blog post about my ambivalence about blogging on the Times Union website.

The Hook-Up Culture Is Getting 20-Somethings Nowhere. On the other hand, Casual Love.

Nixon’s still the one. And What We Lost 40 Years Ago When Nixon Resigned. See Harry Shearer recreate Richard Nixon as he preps and delivers his resignation speech. Plus George Will Confirms Nixon’s Vietnam Treason.

New Zealand’s non-partisan Get Out the Vote campaign. I don’t see such things often in the US. Sure, there’s get our SUPPORTERS to vote, but that’s a different animal.

Deep Dark Fears is “a series of comics exploring those intimate, personal fears that mostly stem from your imagination getting darkly carried away.” Read more about it.

Rod Serling’s closing remarks from The Obsolete Man episode of The Twilight Zone. “It remains profoundly prescient and relevant.”

All these in a 48-hour period: How games’ lazy storytelling uses rape and violence against women as wallpaper and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) has come forward with several stories of being called “chubby,” “fat,” and “porky” by her male colleagues in Congress and Fark prohibits misogyny in new addition to moderator guidelines and Snappy response to sexist harasser in the tech field.

Modern Office with Christina Hendricks.

FLOWCHART: Should You Catcall Her?

Guns and The Rule of Intended Consequences.

What our nightly views might look like if planets, instead of our moon, orbited Earth.

Cartoon: Pinocchio, Inc.

Remember when I wrote about flooding in Albany this month? Dan explains the systemic reason WHY it happened.

Arthur makes the case against “the case against time zones.” I’m not feeling the abolition of time zones either, at this point.

Nōtan: Dark and Light principles of Design.

The jungle gym as math tool.

The disaster drafts for professional sports.

The Procrastination Doom Loop—and How to Break It.

One of my favorite movie quotes, maybe because it’s so meta: “That’s part of your problem: you haven’t seen enough movies. All of life’s riddles are answered in the movies.” (Grand Canyon, 1991)

Seriously, Rebecca Jade, the first niece, is in about four different groups, in a variety of genres. Here’s The Soultones cover band – Promo video. Plus a link to her latest release, Galaxy, with Jaz Williams.

Tosy’s U2, ranked 40-31 and 30-21.

Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, 2004.

August 22, 1969: The Beatles’ Final Photo Shoot

Coverville 1043: The Elvis Costello Cover Story III, in honor of him turning 60.

4 chairs, 4 women; 4 women, no chairs.

12 billion light-years from the edge. A funny bit!

Don Pardo, R.I.P..

Lauren Bacall: always the life of the party. And cinema icon of Hollywood’s golden age, 1924-2014. A Dustbury recollection.

More Robin Williams: on ‘cowardice’ and compassion. Also, a Dan Meth drawing and Aladdin’s Broadway cast gave a him beautiful tribute. Plus, a meeting of Yarmy’s Army and Ulysses.

Jaquandor remembers little Quinn. Damn middle recording made me cry.

The Wellington Hotel Annex in Albany, N.Y. was… murdered in plain sight in front of hundreds of onlookers. “If I were a building, this is how I’d like to go.” Here’s another view.

SamuraiFrog’s Muppet jamboree: C is for Clodhoppers and D Is for Delbert (who evolved) and E is for Eric the Parrot and F is for a Fraggle and G Is for the Gogolala Jubilee Jugband.

New SCRABBLE words. Word Up has identified some of the new three-letter words.

I SO don’t care: one space or two after the period. Here’s a third choice.

The ultimate word on that “digital natives” crap.

Whatever Happened to the Metric System?

Freedom from fear.

Ever wondered what those books behind the glass doors of the cupboard might be thinking or feeling?

The New Yorker thinks Yankovic is weirdly popular.

Here’s a nice Billy Joel story.

Pop songs as sonnets.

House of Clerks, a parody of House of Cards.

Saturday Night Live Political Secrets Revealed.

This Sergio Aragonés masterpiece is included as a fold-out poster within Inside Mad. His priceless gift to all Mad fans shows over six decades of Mad contributors and ephemera within a mish-mash of Mad office walls. The only thing missing in this beautiful mess is a key. Doug Gilford will be attempting to label everything you see with brief (pop-up) descriptions and links to pertinent pages…

Hello Kitty is not a cat. You may have known that; somehow, I missed it.

You May Have Something Extremely Valuable Hiding In Your Change.

Improved names for everyday things

GOOGLE ALERTS (me)

I wrote this blog post about my ambivalence about blogging on the Times Union website. J. Eric Smith, who used to be a TU blogger, responds at length.

SamuraiFrog responds to my response to 16 Habits of Sensitive People. Also, per moi, he does his #1 songs on his birthday: 1987-1996 and 1997-2006, and 2007-2013. I’ll go back to this myself, eventually.

Dustbury on the theme song to My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, which a passage in Schutte’s Mass resembles more than slightly. He discovers a Singapore McDonalds product.

Jaquandor answers my questions about vices such as swearing and politics/American exceptionalism.

He also writes of buckets and the dumping of the water therein, which Gordon thinks hurts nonprofits. Snopes, BTW, debunks the claim that 73 percent of donations to the ALS Association fund executive salaries and overhead.

Do you know that ABC Wednesday meme I mention with a great amount of regularity? I think this recent introduction I wrote explains it fairly well.

Waste of time and money: dividing California

Creating MORE members of Congress, with the requisite expense, does not seem like a winning scenario.

I read, from Evanier, but also elsewhere, that some joker has promoted a ballot initiative to split the Golden State into six states. Even if the ballot initiative somehow won in November – and I have relatives there (sister, niece – Don’t Vote for This Nonsense!) – it still wouldn’t go into effect. Evanier noted, in a conversation about whether Texas, which had been its own country briefly, and would theoretically have the right to splinter:

“You have to consider Article IV, Section 3 of a little document called the United States Constitution. That particular section says…”

New states may be admitted by the Congress into this union; but no new states shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other state; nor any state be formed by the junction of two or more states, or parts of states, without the consent of the legislatures of the states concerned as well as of the Congress.

If you are a US Senator from a small state, populationwise, such as Delaware or Alaska, would you want there to be 12 US Senators from CA when there were two? And if you were from a large state, say Florida or Illinois, why would you want them to have many more Senators than your state?

BTW, Chuck Miller, my fellow blogger with the Times Union, came up with what a divided up New York State might look like. It was a highlighted blog for that day.

Given the disdain with which most of the American people see Congress, creating MORE members, with the requisite expense, does not seem like a winning scenario.

Felony disenfranchisement: keeping the ballot away

The prison population has grown fourfold in the past four decades, while the nation’s population has increased by less than 50% in that period.

The Significant Other of a good friend of mine wrote on Facebook:

I think that Felony Disenfranchisement should be kept in place forever. Our Supreme Court ruled the that the 14th Amendment gives all states the right for deny ex-convicts to vote..To put it simply “” If you broke our laws and were not able to follow our laws”,,””I for one ,,do not want to give you the “”right”” to elect those who make our laws “GET IT” ????

I was sorely tempted to let it go, but there was something about “GET IT” ????” that just pushed a button.

I replied: “That notion suggests that there is no forgiveness, no chance at redemption. Current laws forbidding felons from voting make it harder for them to reintegrate into society, essentially facilitating recidivism. I TOTALLY disagree.”

Specifically, there are several reasons why disenfranchising felons who have served their time is a very bad idea:

The United States, while slow to embrace a more universal suffrage, nevertheless has a history of correcting the limits on the vote. The 15th Amendment states: “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” Amendment 24: notes that voting “shall not be denied or abridged.. by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.” Of course, the 19th Amendment allowed women the right to vote, and the 26th, the right for 18-year-olds.

There are mountains of data that confirm that conviction and sentencing people for the same crime is influenced by class/wealth, and yes, race and ethnicity. If Person A gets off with a misdemeanor, and Person B is slammed with a felony, that’s hardly equal protection under the law. To further the injustice after prison is piling on.

It is also well-documented that the United States has far more people in prison than any country in the world, far more than when Richardson v. Ramirez (1974) was decided in the SCOTUS. The prison population has grown fourfold in the past four decades, while the nation’s population has increased by less than 50% in that period.

And why is that? Could it be the over policing of America, where your daily actions are being incrementally criminalized?

Those convicted of crimes often come back to a community where it is difficult to reintegrate into society. Denying people the right to vote further isolates those individuals.

Finally, and I bring this up because the individual I quoted above has often pointed to a personal Christian faith, it seems counterintuitive to me that if Jesus forgave our sins that we not forgive the sins of others.

The Mississippi US Senate runoff: a poster child for Instant Runoff Voting

Even though New York does not have runoffs, it’s often been the case that a candidate has been elected with less than a majority of the vote.

As you may know, there was a Republican primary for the US Senate seat between longtime incumbent Thad Cochran and Tea Party darling Chris McDaniel on June 3.

Chris McDaniel 155,040 49.5 %
Thad Cochran 153,654 49.0 INCUMBENT
Thomas Carey 4,789 1.5

The Democrats also had their primary for the seat. You probably didn’t know that because a Democrat is highly unlikely to win in the general election in November:
Travis Childers 62,545 74.2%
Bill Marcy 10,134 12.0
William Compton 8,261 9.8
Jonathan Rawl 3,399 4.0

Mississippi election law requires a candidate to win a majority of the vote to be nominated, and McDaniel barely missed the threshold. This meant a runoff election for June 24.

Runoff elections are particularly expensive because 37 of the 40 Senate run-off elections since 1980 have seen decreases in turnout from the initial primary, “reflecting the difficulty in getting voters to care about a primary election two times in a row.”

This, however, was a different beast. The race had “become a proving ground for some Tea Party groups… On top of that, add the deliberate effort by Cochran’s camp to turn out more black voters, mixing up the expected voter pool. That makes predicting turnout tough.” As it turns out, there was a much HIGHER turnout for the runoff.

Cochran * 191,508 50.9%
McDaniel 184,815 49.1

From the Ballotopedia: “Mississippi is one of 21 states with a mixed primary system. Voters do not have to register with a party, but they must intend to support the party nominations if they vote in the primary election.” One aspect is that voters in the Democratic primary on June 3 ought not to have been able to also vote in the Republican runoff on June 24. McDaniel supporters have suggested that’s exactly what happened.

All of this could have been avoided if Mississippi had instituted Instant Runoff Voting:

Instant runoff voting allows voters to rank candidates in order of preference (i.e. first, second, third, fourth and so on). Voters have the option to rank as many or as few candidates as they wish, but can vote without fear that ranking less favored candidates will harm the chances of their most preferred candidates. First choices are then tabulated. If more than two candidates receive votes, a series of runoffs are simulated, using voters’ preferences as indicated on their ballot.
The candidate who receives the fewest first choice rankings is eliminated. All ballots are then retabulated, with each ballot counting as one vote for each voter’s highest ranked candidate who has not been eliminated.

In the Mississippi GOP scenario, after the June 3 primary, Thomas Carey’s votes would have been distributed to Cochran and McDaniel, based on who was Carey voters’ second choice. The majority would have been reached. There would have been no need for the June 24 runoff, and no chance for the Democratic party supporters to vote in the Republican primary without foregoing their opportunity to vote in their OWN primary.

IRV is being used in a number of US jurisdictions, sometimes only for overseas ballots, but sometimes more extensively. Several locales internationally use it as well.

I’d love to see IRV implemented in New York State. Even though New York does not have runoffs, it’s often been the case that a candidate has been elected with less than a majority of the vote. The governor’s race this fall would be a real reflection of the Green Party support since people would not feel that their vote was being “thrown away” on a candidate who could not win. Of course, it can’t happen that soon, but it’s still worth considering.
***
Mark Mayfield, a leading tea party activist in Mississippi who was indicted in an alleged plot to break into a nursing home to film Sen. Thad Cochran’s ailing wife, has died. “Ridgeland, Miss. police say they are investigating the case as a suicide after Mayfield was found dead of a gunshot wound in his home.”

Why the 70th birthday; and why did they rig the student election?

“THEY get away with all sorts of crap. Why shouldn’t we?”

Way back in 2012, Uthacleana asked:

What’s this “Turning 70” meme you’re promoting, Roger? Doesn’t anyone just turn 59 anymore?! ;-p

(I should note that he. and I, turned 59 that year.)

I started doing the 70th birthday thing because the Beatles (Ringo and John by then; Paul and George followed) were all turning the big seven-oh. Other folks I admired were heading towards a milestone. I noted at the time too that three score and ten was noted in the Bible as well (Psalm 90:10).

But it occurred to me only recently that it is also a way to keep track of what I’ve written. My buddy Greg complained when I noted Joe Cocker’s birthday, mostly because he doesn’t like Cocker’s voice. (BTW, that’s the beauty of a daily blog; if I write something not of interest today, maybe tomorrow will be more to your liking.)

Greg then suggested I should have noted Cher. But Cher only turned 68 in May. If I HAD written about Cher in 2014, what would I do for 2016? And would I have remembered that I had already done so? This way I have a couple more years to muse on what I’ll write about since I DON’T have much of Cher’s music.

Now there are people who turned 70 before I started the blog – Sophia Loren, Smokey Robinson, for two – so I’ll peg 80, which is mentioned in the same Biblical verse. And there are people I just plan missed, so I might do a 75th natal day, from time to time.

The best answer to “Why 70?” is that it is an organizational tool. One gets a 70th birthday only once, so I’m likely not to repeat myself too much.
***
I wrote this post about The crooked student government elections at my undergraduate college, New Paltz in 1974. Dan Van Riper wrote:

Amazing that a college student election would be so blatantly corrupted with repeat voting. This is something you don’t see in real elections, as has become clear with all this rad-righty insistence with voting ID laws and limiting access to voting. So why were the… elections so corrupt, or maybe instead I should ask, why were your fellow students so irresponsible? Any ideas?

A few days later, when I had not replied, he e-mailed me:

Seriously, I want to know why the students at your college voted multiple times. What caused them to do that? You must have heard by now that voter fraud in the real world is virtually non-existent:

“There was not a single identified case of impersonation fraud at the polls – people showing up and pretending to be another voter – meaning that Schultz’s own investigation found no cases at all that would have been prevented with his proposed voter identification law.”

The idea that regular folks the voting process so much that they rarely try to cheat is somewhat counter-intuitive. We have been trained expect our fellow citizens to try and hurt each other selfishly at every opportunity, and here they are not doing so. I’m very interested in your opinion on the matter.

The answer, I’m afraid, is I don’t know, which is why I didn’t respond right away. I do have two competing theories, though:

1) The students really wanted all the parties and concerts that the winning coalition promised. This seems possible, but not likely.

2) The students did it because they could. Understand that there was considerable antipathy towards authority figures after the carnage of the Vietnam war, brought into our homes each night; the slow pace of racial justice, fractured by the deaths of Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy, and others only a few years back; and the government lawlessness that was Watergate, as the House of Representatives considered impeachment of President Nixon.

I think the voter fraud was a statement of nihilism. “THEY get away with all sorts of crap. Why shouldn’t we?” So they messed with The System because The System was corrupt and because they could do it easily.

Oh, I suppose there was a third possibility:

3) They were from Chicago, where the motto was: “Vote early and vote often,” and they were taking the joke seriously.