Granath
1811
Reagan would turn over in his grave at the current Republican party. For all his faults he was a champion of Democracy across the world and truly wanted the votes counted. The modern GOP has no interest in Democracy, just power.
If you want to watch the sausage get made:
Banzai
1813
Replace modern GOP with “white nationalist party” and it’s just a redundant sentence.
Lots of the things I read now about the GOP make perfect sense with that little substitution.
This is adorable and charming to watch, btw. (The Maine ranked-choice voting tabulation.)
They’re having to vamp for time while the tabulations happen, and it is ADORABLE. This really sweet lady, who seems fearsomely competent at her job, btw, is going into excruciating detail about how the results were tabulated, how the machines work, etc.
She also mentioned that she’s a Virgo. I’m not kidding. This is amazing.
Now they’re doing search and replace on an excel spreadsheet of the vote tabulations. And putting formulae in to total columns/rows.
This is like watching me at work! I love this!!
I don’t know when the pension thing started, but decades later ex-President Grant went broke (thanks to a financial scam artist) and at the end of his life, while dying of cancer, had to write his memoirs to secure his family’s independence.
It started in the 50s, to spare Harry Truman the sort of financial troubles Grant faced.
Golden wins on 2nd choice voting. FLIP!
You’re right, this is super charming. Everyone should do this.
The transparency, the explanations, all terrific. So happy they did that, from even just a process standpoint.
What I loved is just that they were INTO it. Like “This is what we do y’all, we got this.”
From 2015:
When South Dakota Republican Kristi Noem was looking for a new office at the beginning of this Congress, she knew she’d need one thing in particular: closet space.
Noem is one of dozens of lawmakers who, by day, work in the office buildings on the House side of the U.S. Capitol and, by night, live in them.
“There’s storage in this room here for my blankets and pillows,” Noem told NPR in a recent tour of her office in the Rayburn building.
And given that we’d rather not have them compromised and even tempted to sell state secrets to pay bills, I have zero problem with this. I suspect that’s part of the reason it happened when it did (at the start of the Cold War).
Wow, not till the 1950’s? That’s bananas.
Yeah, they were in with my old Representative, George Miller (who, IIRC, owned the house they all lived in), until he finally retired after forever in the House. It seemed kind of collegiate and fun.
Democracy still seems to work in New England (especially NH, ME, and VT).
I’m little surprised at the use of spreadsheets in the process.
One of my first jobs out of college was being writing a spreadsheet, we certainly weren’t developing it for something like tabulating state-wide elections.
Not what Nelson was hoping for from the machine counts.
