By David Futrelle
If you haven’t already, GO VOTE and then come back to enjoy(?) this open thread. Tell us how it went. Talk about any shady sit the GOP tries to pull today. Discuss the results as they come in. Talk about your hobbies. Post pictures of animals. Post videos. Whatever it takes to get through this incredibly nerve-wracking day.
No trolls.
I kinda wonder how Ted Cruz was even legally allowed to run. Could someone please point me to the Supreme Court case that gave sentient balls of toenail clippings and bile personhood status?
I am a little bit disappointed. I was hoping for slightly better results.
But! Control of the House is the most important thing, and the Dems got that comfortably. Even with all the Gerrymandering, we still got the house! And we won a lot of important Governor races, state and local races, and initiatives/referendums. Sadly none in my state, but still. Overall it’s a good result. Some of us just had let our hopes get too high.
And some of the wins are really sweet. Kansas has a Dem Governor! So does Wisconsin! Kris Kobach and Scott Walker are out! WOOOOHOOOO!!!
And Michigan and Missouri are both getting independent redistricting commissions!! That will help reduce gerrymandering in those 2 states at least. Michigan also got automatic voter registration and same-day voting registration! And legal pot!
Even in Florida amongst the heartbreaking results is a bit of good news. Voting rights restored to 1.4 million people! That’s incredible!
First 2 Native American women ever elected to Congress! Also first 2 Muslim women ever elected to Congress! Lots of other firsts too!
So yeah, lots of good stuff.
@Scented ditto on that.
Almost forgot CA state propositions.
On the one hand…good, preventing prop 13 from doing even more damage, and we kept the gas tax.
On the other hand…well, I knew the dialysis proposition was a longshot, but DAMN, I had high hopes for the rent control proposition. Kinda feels like I’m going to have to hope for something at the actual legislative level…assuming some assholes don’t get a proposition on the ballot to repeal whatever the legislature comes up with.
Oh well, sounds like other states (that aren’t named Alabama) had a lot better luck with their laws. Go MA!
Thankfully Jared Polis won the Governor’s seat here in Colorado. It gives me a little hope.
I’m really sad for Florida too. You really deserved Gillum. Lots of other places lost ground too. But only a bit of ground. Kobach is gone! That’s not small.
I agree with lkeke35, America deserves a government that looks like America, and it’s going to take a long time to get there, and they’re gonna fight us for every inch. Keep Moving Forward is a great motto. I’m gonna use it.
Regarding Bill Vander Zalm I actually have a piece of memorabilia for him. It’s Quotations From Chairman Zalm, a book compiled by Stephen Osbourne and Mary Schendlinger of various silly things he said. It’s a tiny book intended to mimic Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung aka The Little Red Book.
He was such a flop as BC Premier that the Social Credit Party, which had governed BC for all but 3 years since 1952, not only lost the 1991 provincial election, it utterly collapsed afterward. In the 1996 election they got 0.6 percent of the vote.
Other good news from Nevada! We voted to get rid of the tampon tax and in favor of automatic voter registration!
I also wanted to share a Facebook post I came across today. I don’t have the energy to start a Facebook war today, but I thought you all might like to hear it.
Someone was complaining that you only need to win two counties to win the state here (because those counties are where the two large population centers are). A comment on that post then complained that there were busses to take college students to the polls.
Ummmmm…you kinda tipped your hand there a little bit, didn’t you? They basically admitted that their (R) candidate couldn’t win without suppressing votes.
I want to share a story with everyone re the small victories today, a story from your polite neighbors up north.
3 years ago, we had a federal election. I voted strategically for the choice that I believed would end the need to vote strategically, end first-past-the-post and bring in proportional or ranking or multiple choice or literally anything else.
As expected, upon Trudeau’s victory, he first responded with his hesitancy to go forward with the promise to abolish FPTP, expressed the difficulty of doing so, and then just outright abandoned it all together.
But the story doesn’t end there.
Several federal and local government surveys were sent out, asking Canadians about their moral views and how they view the current voting system. Many of them were deceiving or confusing, yet we made our voices heard, and now, 3 years later, the provincial government of BC is holding an official referendum on changing the voting system for local elections. We are now at the beginning of a country wide change, wether the current or next political party wants it or not.
Moral of the story is, just having the conversation, at a country-wide level can sometimes be enough, regardless of the outcome, to begin the avalanche of change.
Reasons to feel good from Van Jones
OT: Jeff Sessions out as Attorney General; Matt Witaker is now running the joint.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2018/11/07/politics/sessions-resign/index.html
@Redsilkphoenix
I wonder what that will mean in the long run for the Mueller investigation.
@tim gueguen:
I think it was in 1990 that political cartoonist Raeside had a cartoon of Vander Zalm at the helm of a little tugboat named ‘S. S. Social Credit’… the boat was completely underwater and still sinking, there were two people out on deck trying to hold their breaths and pounding at the door, and inside the wheelhouse Vander Zalm was yelling back at them, “Don’t bother me with details, full steam ahead!”
@Jane Done:
Good luck with that… unfortunately, botching an attempt at a voting system referendum here in Ontario is yet another thing to be annoyed at Dalton McGuinty about. There was so little real education or attempts to explain what would happen that the ‘don’t change anything’ side got to fear-monger and set the tone of the entire conversation. The proposal died at least in part because of neglect on the part of the people who were supposed to be pushing it. I hope B.C. does better with that.
Then again, B.C.’s version of publicly-forced ballot proposals and referendums was what allowed Vander Zalm to do his own fear-mongering and kill the HST switchover after significant amounts of money and time had been spent actually performing the switchover, thus requiring more money and time to be spent switching back. It’s very much a double-edged sword.
@Jenora Feuer
I remember that referendum. The information on the mixed-member proportional concept was so scant that I also ended up voting FPTP. *sigh* Oh well, that’s only the second in my “votes I regret” column.
Gaebolga, I saw that meme and couldn’t even laugh at it because it is just too on the nose.
Scildfreja, I really like Gillum. I appreciate that he doesnt come from a rich family (unlike every other person running did). He really gets what it means to be poor/middle class, and had good ideas on how to help level the playing field. The only hope I have is that DeSantis will implode and have to resign.
Redsilkphoenix – Go ahead and vent. This is an open thread, after all, and the only caveat was “no trolls.”
I’ll be reading.
The question about ‘crib sheets’ at the polls just goes to show how different the states’ voting rules and procedures are; here in CA, we get sample ballots to fill out to take to the polls with us!
My best hope right now, as a Floridian, is to note that the number of people who just had their voting rights restored, after decades of being denied by our overtly racist system, is greater than the margin of any of last night’s Florida elections.
Please let this be the sea-change we need.
@ Redsilkphoenix,
What Hambeast said and we’ll be happy to read your thoughts too. My pals here came over to commiserate with me since I lost it over a paper cut. This necessitated a trip to the liquor store. I really do need to get a grip on myself.
Go ahead and vent, we’re here reading along too.
So to the surprise of absolutely no one, it turns out Tony Clement’s been a creep all along.
https://www.cbc.ca/radio/asithappens/instagram-user-describes-how-tony-clement-crossed-a-line-1.4896383
@Katamount:
I knew what the mixed-member proportional meant, but then, I’ve had interests in voting systems since getting introduced to Arrow’s impossibility theorem back in University. This can be basically summarized as ‘there is no perfect voting system’, though it gets into a lot more detail than that.
I was just annoyed that there had been no real attempt at explaining what it meant. It was like somebody went ‘well, we have to do this, so let’s just put it out there and let it sink on its own so nobody will blame us’.
With the current state of Canadian politics, anybody on the Conservative side is going to fight tooth and nail against anything that dilutes the advantages of First Past The Post, because those tend to be what gets modern Conservatives into power. The NDP tends to be greatly in favour, and the Liberals are in favour in theory but often not necessarily in practice.
And this is without the crazy levels of gerrymandering that happen elsewhere to reinforce FPTP even more. (Not that Canada’s riding layout is anywhere near perfect, but having the drawing done by civil servant committees make it harder to actively politicize.)
It does look like the current B.C. referendum has actively worked to block some of the biggest arguments against Ontario’s MMP scheme. First by breaking it into two questions, one for ‘keep the old scheme, or switch to a new one’ and two for ‘if we switch, which of these to use’ (which reduces the issue of people voting against the change because the proposed change wasn’t enough of a change); and second because not all of the proposed systems have the same sort of issue of ‘ahh, there are MPs that aren’t accountable to any riding!’ that was one of the biggest fear-mongering arguments used in Ontario.
@Jenora Feuer
Honestly, I’ve always thought the run-off system is the best one, but it’s hard enough to get people to vote once in Canada that I prefer not to imagine the turnout rate if you tried to make them go back two weeks later. (Hence why I’m theoretically in favor of ranked ballots, if you can get them to work.)
That’s one of the things that pissed me off with Trudeau, I was looking forward to getting rid of FPTP, then he backtracked.
https://www.thebeaverton.com/2018/11/28108/
@Jesalin
Considering that Patrick Brown won his election, that’s all too clear…
@Jesalin
We missed you at game last session, and also just in general. Next session is tomorrow, usual time?