spit_evil_olive_tips

joined 1 month ago
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80
The men who swallowed everything: This campaign season, some of America’s richest people promoted, and even seemed to believe, ludicrous hoaxes (www.motherjones.com)
 

If there’s one salient feature of the 2024 election cycle, it’s that rich people—rich men, particularly, and even more particularly ones who support Donald Trump’s reelection campaign—fell for things at a previously unimaginable rate. Separate from simply supporting Trump or advancing right-wing talking points, they promoted ideas and stories that almost no reasonable person could possibly believe: cartoonish lies, absurd leaps of logic, and clearly fake documents.

What state & local election results are you following? in c/politics@beehaw.org
[–] spit_evil_olive_tips@beehaw.org 4 points 2 weeks ago

here in Seattle: the at-large City Council seat (district 8) between Tanya Woo and Alexis Mercedes-Rinck

Woo ran for a different city council seat a year ago, and lost. in the same election, a sitting city councilmember (Teresa Mosqueda) won an election to the King County Council, so she resigned her city council seat. to fill that vacant seat, the other newly-elected city councilmembers appointed Woo, even though she had just lost.

by the rules of the resignation and temporary appointment, the next regular election (now) elects a permanent replacement.

this leads to an unusual scenario - normally, Seattle (and all of Washington state) holds its municipal elections in odd years. the current mayor was elected in 2021, the most recent city council election was 2023. this leads predictably to much lower turnout for the municipal elections, which leads in turn to conservative business interests having an easier time buying the local elections.

Woo is aligned with the "business-friendly", conservative (by Seattle standards) councilmembers who were elected in 2023. Mercedes-Rinck is significantly more progressive.

based on the primary results and subsequent polls, Woo winning seems pretty unlikely - but the margin of Mercedes-Rinck's victory will still be interesting, because of what it says about Seattle politics in elections with high turnout. voter turnout in the 2023 elections was a dismal 36%. this year is likely to be in the ~80% range.

it's also an opportunity for something very funny to happen - Tanya Woo may set a record that will likely never be broken, becoming the first candidate in city history to lose 2 elections in consecutive 2 years, for a seat that normally gets elected every 4 years.

9
What state & local election results are you following? (beehaw.org)
 

everyone is focused on the Presidential race, for obvious reasons, and to a lesser extent on control of the House and Senate.

but there's thousands of downballot races across the country. are there any that you're watching / particularly interested in?

38
Inside the plan to use AI to purge voter rolls (www.404media.co)
 

Nancy Gay, the executive director of Columbia County’s Board of Elections, told 404 Media that the county ultimately did not use EagleAI this year because it ran out of time to get trained on it before the election. But the audio shows how the software was pitched, what voters in the county think about it, and, most importantly, show how some election officials have in some cases begun repeating and spreading ideas that are popular with election deniers.

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Opinion: What four more years of Trump would mean for trans people like me (www.msnbc.com)
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Volunteers with wheelchair vans are ensuring disabled voters have a say on Election Day (19thnews.org)
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Breaking a Child’s Will: The Evangelical family’s twisted obsession with corporal punishment (www.thecut.com)
 

archive link: https://archive.is/H0FZY

from Talia Lavin, who's high on my list of "anything she writes is worth reading" journalists. an excerpt from her upcoming book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America.

hopefully the title made it obvious, but a big ol' content warning for explicit and heartbreaking details about child abuse and endangerment.

17
San Antonio's 'Fairies Fiasco' (www.texasobserver.org)