Showing posts with label Amy Walter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Amy Walter. Show all posts

Sunday, July 12, 2020

#VoteByMail - A word or two or three about the reliability of absentee ballots, via Wisconsin's recent very negative experience; Friends don't let friends vote for #JenniferGottlieb



Over the weekend I shared this interesting news about voting by mail with about 175 or so politics-centric friends and collegues in South Florida and Tallahassee via email, and a different version of that to the folks on the local #HollywoodFL #NextDoor website, which I'm now contributing a considered thought or two more often than I have in the past.

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This Reality Check re the reliability of absentee ballots comes via a tweet last week by veteran U.S. politics and elections expert Amy Walter, the National Editor of The Cook Political Report and a weekly guest on The PBS NewsHour, who also hosts one of the best political podcasts around.

It's called, logically enough, "Politics with Amy Walter" https://www.npr.org/podcasts/675388201/politics-with-amy-walter
Twitter: @amyewalter https://twitter.com/amyewalter/with_replies
Read her columns at: https://cookpolitical.com/about/staff/amy-walter/analysis

This bit of news also serves as a real counter-intuitive slap in the face to most of the U.S. TV network correspondents reporting recently on the Wisconsin primary, who focused mostly on the effect of #COVID19 on election turnout and public engagement, NOT on the very bad blood between the Republican-majority Wisconsin state legislature and the Democratic governor, Tony Evers


The Wisconsin elections had also figured in a recent decision where the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a lower court's decision to grant six extra days for absentee ballots to be received in Wisconsin's statewide balloting.

https://twitter.com/amyewalter/status/1281930223819333638
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “The U.S. Postal Service has identified hundreds of absentee ballots for the April election that never made it to voters or couldn't be counted because of postmark problems, a new report says.“ https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/politics/2020/07/10/wisconsin-absentee-ballots-didnt-get-counted-because-late-delivery-misdelivery-and-bad-postmarks-pos/5417084002/


I incorporated Amy's catch of this Journal Sentinel article last week after seeing an interesting tweet by Anthony Man of the Sun Sentinel about the number of election ballots being requested by Broward voters for the upcoming August 18th election, some of which will soon be making their way to friends who are smart enough to be up north in places not nearly as hot, humid, and muggy as Hollywood and Hallandale Beach in the summer.

That election includes lots of races for offices in Broward that in my opinion ought to be appearing on the November ballot, like the Broward School Board races.
More on that last point soon!



Speaking of elections and how they are run and who runs them, re #JenniferGottlieb.
Friends don't let friends vote for #JenniferGottlieb.





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For the most recent info re #VoteBymail: https://twitter.com/hashtag/votebymail?f=live


Dave 
David B. Smith 


Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Hotline TV: Blanche Lincoln's Senate campaign ad; "Never in the history of Arkansas politics has someone won by proclaiming that they're liberal"

Above. my license to practice politics in Arkansas. And to make it easier for me to flash my credentials, I had it made into a key chain! License is courtesy of my dear friend Shannon, a beautiful multi-talented dynamo from a town called Hope. Yes, THAT Hope.
(Her mother grew-up across the street from Bill Clinton.)

Hotline TV, May 4, 2010:
NAME DROPPING: Primary Endorsements, Bandwagon & AR SEN Ad



http://www.youtube.com/user/HotlineTV http://hotlineoncall.nationaljournal.com/

I've long felt that Arkansas Senator Blanche Lincoln was the perfect antidote to almost everything negative I ever saw on Capitol Hill in my many years in Washington: a bright and thoughtful person who got so fed-up with the status quo and the sinking feeling that her own viewpoint was getting short shrift, that she decided to do something both RISKY and POSITIVE about it.
She ran against her former boss -and beat- Beryl Anthony, a popular incumbent Democratic Arkansas congressman in the primary!

In 1998 she was elected to the U.S. Senate, re-elected in 2004, and now faces national liberal poster boy Bill Halter, the Arkansas Lieutenant Governor, for the Democratic nomination, with the primary scheduled for May 18. Halter is beloved in the liberal blogging community -by Ron Gunzburger, for instance- despite the large number of jobs he has sent overseas.



Of course, for all their talk about the common man, the vast majority of Halter's supporters don't actually know anyone in Arkansas whose job went overseas, so they play dumb and instead excoriate Lincoln for not being more liberal in a coal-dependent
state that doesn't value either extremist politicians or outsiders telling them what's what and who to vote for.

It's a state that I first visited when I was a kid growing-up in Memphis, but even then, I couldn't help but notice the overwhelmingly friendliness and kindness of the people I met, who'd offer to help you before you ever thought to ask.
Every trip back there has been just like that.
And it's so beautiful, too, in a way that people who have always lived on the East Coast or South Florida can't imagine.

It's also a state where the friendly people who run the charities and civic groups, and who make sure that the ball fields are manicured on weekends for their sons and daughters to play baseball or softball on, are strongly against Obamacare and favors its repeal, and as Rasmussen Reports details below,
"By a 61% to 31% margin, Arkansas voters say their views on today’s major issues are more in line with those of the average Tea Party member than with the views of President Obama."

Though I disagree with her position on Obamacare, in every other way, Blanche Lincoln has shown thru her words and actions that she's a true profile in courage, the likes of which does not currently exist in either Broward or Miami-Dade. As is patently obvious when we open the local newspaper or turn on the local news.
http://lincoln.senate.gov/

Which is to say that she's the polar opposite of an Ilene Lieberman, who seems incapable of not always thinking about how she, her husband and their pals can benefit from the existing political system that's riddled with loopholes which someone as smart as her has proven quite adept at manipulating, and not particularly interested in eliminating. Not that Mitch Caesar cares about that, either.
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Rasmussen Reports

Election 2010: Arkansas Senate
Arkansas Senate: Lincoln’s Support Continues to Slide
http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/elections2/election_2010/election_2010_senate_elections/arkansas/election_2010_arkansas_senate

U.S. News & World Report
http://www.usnews.com/articles/opinion/2010/03/24/demint-lincoln-and-the-perils-of-progressive-purity-politics.html

DeMint, Lincoln, and the Perils of Progressive Purity Politics-
By Robert Schlesinger
Posted March 24, 2010