Tag Archives: voting

The Case of the Missing White Voters?

the post election dominate narrative is about a structural demographic shift working against republicans – i.e. they can no longer win by gaining a larger piece of the ever shrinking white portion of the electoral pie ( to mix a metaphor. badly. ). but has anyone seen corroboration of the claim that 7 million white voters just didn’t show up to the polls: ” The increased share of the minority vote as a percent of the total vote is not the result of a large increase in minorities in the numerator, it is a function of many fewer whites in the denominator.” if true the narrative might be quite a bit different if the republicans come up with a candidate that can “reactivate” them in 2016. update: “There Aren’t As Many Missing Voters As It Seems” and “There Are No “Missing Voters”” both, well, say there aren’t as many missing voters as claimed in the realclearpolitics.com post.

i voted! and my earliest presidential election memory.

i voted! and my earliest presidential election memory.

decisions, decisions.

the nice ladies at the volunteer booth said they had an “unheard of” number of absentee ballots. not sure what that means.

odin has been really interested in this election, asking me why i didn’t vote early ( i love that he doesn’t ask why you vote, or where you vote or when you vote, but why i haven’t voted early! ) and he even apparently dreamed about carrying an flag on election day.

i realized this morning that my earliest presidential election memory is of watching the 1980 election returns on television with my grandparents when i was odin’s age.

i think i remember the superman movie was playing on hbo and was sort-of annoyed that we had to keep flipping between stations to watch the boring old election.

i’m sure someone will probably fact check my memory and tell me that i wasn’t at my grandparent’s house or that superman wasn’t broadcast on hbo in 1980, but that’s my memory and i’m sticking to it!

i should note that there is some controversy over photographing your vote. as far as i know ( though ianal ) wisconsin state law does not expressly prohibit recording inside the polling place and any photo of an unmarked ballot where not prohibited should be legal.

democracy. or a voting booth pen is mightier than the sword?

democracy. or a voting booth pen is mightier than the sword?

it might sound morbid, but whenever i walk into a voting booth i invariably think of all the people who have died defending our freedoms, including the right to vote and all the people who have died around the world attempting to get the right to vote.

it seems like the least i could do is to stay informed of the issues to make the best decision i can with a mark on a ballot.

by the time i cast by ballot right before the polls closed over 1,600 people had voted in the controversial kapanke recall which is easily 4 times what would be considered a normal turnout in a mid-term election.

it’ll be interesting to see how it turns out. i saw a lot of unfamiliar faces at the voting station, including the elderly man in the booth next to me who had appeared to have never voted before.

amusingly ( or not ), despite the new sort-of requirement for a driver’s license and signatures on paperwork, kris voted after me and discovered the kindly volunteers had mixed up our ballot numbers and names which could have possibly invalidated both our votes.