Archive for October, 2008
A federal judge upheld the ban on campaign T-shirts and buttons in Michigan polling locations or within 100 feet of an entrance. I happen to agree with this policy.
How about other states? Are similar laws common elsewhere? What do you guys think of this sort of restriction?
UPDATE: Forgot to mention that the use of cameras is also banned:
Voters are being urged by the Video Your Vote project to take photos at polling places, but that’s not allowed in Michigan.
Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land reminded voters Wednesday that those who try to do so risk having their ballots taken away and their votes declared invalid.
I’m not quite so sure about this one.
Tough to tell exactly what happened. Probably just a bad round? Or maybe incoming counter battery or a missile? Blast seems kind of small for incoming.
Moron dropped the round in upside-down? I have no clue about the fusing options available.
I don’t know what the laws are in other states, but in Michigan candidates and campaign material can’t be at closer than 100 feet from any entrance to a polling place. This includes clothing, hats, and buttons. That law is being challenged.
A federal judge has promised to rule within two days on whether Michigan’s ban on wearing campaign T-shirts and buttons inside polling places should be upheld.
U.S. District Judge Patrick Duggan heard oral arguments in the case on Monday. The lawsuit was brought this month by Council 25 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees against Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land and state elections director Chris Thomas.
AFSCME attorney Herbert Sanders said the ban oppresses voters’ right to freedom of expression and abridges their right to vote free from intimidation.
“This is going to create a significant disruption in one of the largest elections ever in the history of the country,” he told the judge.
Sanders also called it a “pretext for discrimination,” arguing election officials will arbitrarily enforce the law, which he said has historically led to unequal treatment of minorities.
I’m not sure how not allowing any political T-shirts hurts freedom from intimidation. I think that allowing political t-shirts may threaten freedom from intimidation, not the other way around.
And I guess I’d have to see some evidence that minorities have been treated unfairly over this. Even if they have been, the answer is not to abolish the rule but to enforce it equally.
I recall a comment threat on with one-time MO reader MarinesGirl who lived in the Detroit area and was telling how she was dressing her son up in all sorts of John Kerry stuff to go down and hang out at the polling station on election day, 2004. I emailed her to remind her not to get closer than 100 feet lest they get in trouble. She responded that it was sweet of me to worry, but they had no problem hanging out there for hours talking with people in line about Kerry and how much George Bush sucked and telling jokes and stuff inside the polling station and that no one cared or minded.
Detroit.
As argued in the Wall Street Journal, including:
In late 2003, Cofer Black, the State Department’s Counterterrorism Coordinator, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that Syria “needs to do a lot more” to stop terrorist infiltration, but added that he “remained optimistic that continued engagement with Syria will one day lead to a change in Syrian behavior.”
It didn’t. The following May, Mr. Bush ordered the minimum possible sanctions on Damascus under the Syria Accountability Act of 2003. Though Damascus offered some token intelligence cooperation, it also turned Damascus International Airport into the central hub through which jihadists from Morocco to Saudi Arabia could reach Iraq. Insurgent leaders were brazen enough to hold meetings, in Damascus hotels, that were known both to Syrian and U.S. intelligence.
Administration hawks urged more forceful action, including Predator missile strikes against terrorist hideouts in Syria. But the CIA and others valued ties to Syrian intelligence, and in January 2005 Mr. Bush decided instead to send then Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage to Damascus to read Mr. Assad the riot act. Mr. Armitage succeeded in getting the Syrians to turn over Saddam’s half-brother, Sabawi Ibrahim Hassan, a ringleader of the insurgency. This token cooperation, along with episodic Syrian efforts to police their border with Iraq, served mainly to disguise their ongoing support for the insurgency.
I thought Pelosi was straightening all that Syria nonsense out.
Ares I and launch tower
First was the discovery that it lacked sufficient power to lift astronauts in a state-of-the-art capsule into orbit. Then engineers found out that it might vibrate like a giant tuning fork, shaking its crew to death.
Now, in the latest setback to the Ares I, computer models show the ship could crash into its launch tower during liftoff.
Murdoc’s no rocket scientist, but he’s never been convinced that the SRB-based pogostick made sense.
The Space Shuttle is an albatross around the neck of American manned space flight.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if a nuclear bomb goes off in your city?
With Google’s Maps framework and a bit of Javascript, you can see the outcome.
Lex, my mother lives in Hackensack...
Very basic applet no blast or fallout results, or terrain effects, but sort of interesting.
Also:
Bummer. I never met Mr. Barnett, but I read a lot of his stuff.
He was one that I often told myself “I need to link to this guy more.”
A reader sends this on concerning the disallowed ballots in Virginia that I noted last week:
The State of Virginia announced that a number of Uniformed Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act (UOCAVA) members submitted Federal Write-In Absentee Ballots (FWAB) which will not be counted due to administrative errors. Virginia requires FWABs submitted as both an absentee ballot application and as a voted ballot contain both the witness’ signature and the witness’ address to be counted in the General Election. Having consulted both FVAP and the Virginia Absentee Voter Office, we recommend that voters who submitted the FWAB as both their application and their ballot complete a Federal Postcard Application (FPCA) and email it to their county voter registration office NLT 1700 28 OCT 08. Once the FPCA arrives, the voted ballot already on hand becomes valid and will be counted. The Army Voting Action Officer is emailing this information to the Senior Voting Assistance Officers (SVAOs) and Installation Voting Assistance Officers (IVAOs) for dissemination and action by voters. See your Unit Voting Assistance Officer (UVAO) for assistance
This means that those overseas in this predicament have until the close of business on Tuesday to email an FPCA to their county voter registration office.
I’m trying to find a link to the form and the specific email address to send it to and will post them if I find them.
If you’ve got friends or relatives who may have been affected by this issue, let them know immediately.
UPDATE:
The status of a Virginia absentee ballot can be checked here.
Here is an interactive PDF of the Federal Postcard Application (FPCA) to be filled out and emailed. Here is a back-up in the event that the government source has, um, issues.
Here is an email form for the Voter Registration Office, but you can’t attach the PDF using it and I can’t figure out the actual email address.
UPDATE 2: Another group of voters afraid of being disenfranchised has posted the actual email address. It’s apparently voting@fairfaxcounty.gov.
UPDATE 3: Color me shocked. And impressed. I had sent in a request for clarification via their web form and someone actually responded. Within an hour or so.
Voters who use the Federal Postcard Application do not have to provide a witness. The requirement applies only to those voters who submit a Federal Write In Ballot without having first applied for an absentee ballot.
This isn’t actually new news, and it didn’t actually answer my question about whether submitting a properly filled-out FPCA would solve the problem with the ballots in question. And it didn’t tell me where those FPCAs should be sent. But hey, someone answered.
Anyway, the problem is with voters who use the absentee ballot to BOTH apply for absentee voting and to actually cast the vote. These are what requires the address of the witness. Those that applied for an absentee ballot previously don’t need a witness address on their ballot. According to Lex, this affects at least 42 voters that they’re aware of. Hopefully, those 42 will get things sorted out in time.
Nice.
And here’s a Vietnam-era gun truck kit:
5-ton M54A2 Mounted with Stripped Down Hull of Armored Personnel Carrier
USMC MRAP (left) and donkey in Iraq
DoD To Buy New Interim Vehicles
The U.S. Army and Marine Corps plan to rapidly develop and buy a fleet of 7- to 10-ton vehicles intended to fend off increasingly frequent roadside bombs yet be more mobile than MRAPs, a senior Pentagon official said.
To be developed along the fast-track model used for Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, the so-called interim vehicles will meet an urgent need in Afghanistan for tough transports that can go off-road, he said.
Oshkosh’s Sandcat and Force Protection’s 7-ton Cheetah are among the contenders.
This decision shows that the MRAP, while certainly valuable in many situations, is not a complete solution.
