Progressives Every Day: Runoff Results and Florida Heat
Progressives Every Day: Runoff Results and Florida Heat
Welcome to a Tuesday night edition of Progressives Everywhere! Let’s jump right in!
Primary Results
Akilah Bacy, our candidate in Texas’s 138th legislative district, is running away with the runoff tonight. She will be the Democratic candidate in the most flippable district in the state this fall.
The race for the Democratic nomination to take on Texas Sen. John Cornyn is neck-and-neck; right now, at 10:30 pm EST, MJ Hegar is leading Royce West 52-48.
In Maine, State House Speaker Sara Gideon is officially the Democratic nominee for Senate. Susan Collins must be very concerned by these numbers:
I’ll have more results in tomorrow’s edition of the newsletter!
Ballot Access Blues
Rarely does a week go by when there’s not some drama over voting rights in Georgia.
Last month, in spite of the fact that in-person election day voting was something of a disaster, Georgia experienced record turnout for a primary election. The massive turnout was in large part thanks to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s decision to send every registered voter an absentee ballot application. As a result, Raffensperger announced that he would not be sending applications for the general election — the Georgia GOP is fundamentally opposed to voting rights — and that instead, people could access the application online.
According to Georgia law, voters can return applications via mail, fax, email, or in person at an appropriate government facility. But on Tuesday, word broke that Fulton County — the state’s largest county, home to the Atlanta metropolitan area — was not accepting ballots sent over email. At first, the county stood its ground, but some internet shaming quickly forced a reversal. There are still somewhat stringent requirements for the kind of file voters need to include in their email, but it’s a start.
While Fulton County election officials clearly need to clean up their act — far too many of the ballots they sent out for the primary never got to voters — the problem runs deeper than just a recalcitrant county election board.
After the primary debacle last month, I interviewed Sara Tindall Ghazal, who was the first Democratic Party Voter Protection Director and is now a candidate for the state legislature. From everything she’d heard from election officials on the ground, it was the state’s failure to offer counties the necessary resources to run the election that caused so many of the problems during the primary. Similarly, while Raffensperger has promised to create a website where voters can request absentee ballots for the general election, he has yet to do so, leaving counties to handle the unprecedented influx on their own.
The mass shift to vote-by-mail this year has not only caused new problems, but it’s also served to highlight existing ones that had largely gone overlooked to this point. People with disabilities have long struggled with accessibility issues, and any roadblocks to absentee ballots erected by states make it exponentially more difficult for those with physical impediments to cast their votes. In Texas, where the primary runoff creates an extra layer of confusion, it has been something of a disaster this year:
In Travis County, about 4,600 voters — some with disabilities, some 65 and older, many of them drawn to vote by mail for the first time during the pandemic — incorrectly filled out their applications to vote by mail for the runoff. They were seemingly tripped up by a series of checkboxes offering separate options to request ballots for all elections in the calendar year, for a party primary and for a runoff. Thousands of voters indicated they wanted a ballot but left unmarked either the runoff box or the one indicating their party. Now, unless they’re willing to vote in person, some will be shut out of their party runoffs.
“It’s the fault of the form,” said Travis County Clerk Dana DeBeauvoir. “The form didn’t say anything about primary runoff and which ballot to ask for, and voters improvised.”
If only the Secretary of State would allow counties to proactively send absentee ballot applications…
Florida’s Democratic Leader Emerges
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis is only a year and a half into his first term, but he’s doing such an egregiously terrible job that it’s not too early to start thinking about which Democrat will rake him over the coals come 2022. While former Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum gave DeSantis a very close race in 2018, he’s probably the one Florida politician to earn even worse headlines than the governor this year, so there’s lots of space for new contenders to emerge.
Right now, I’ve got to think that Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried, the one Democrat to win statewide office in 2018, is positioning herself as the front-runner. She’s been sharply critical of DeSantis throughout the state’s struggle with the coronavirus pandemic, and now that Florida is reaching unprecedented levels of new cases, she’s going national with her displeasure, dropping the hammer on DeSantis as he continues to make decisions that are actively killing people.
Here’s a sampling of what she said on CNN today:
“The problem is the Governor has lost the faith and the trust from the people of our state… They no longer count on the data coming out. They no longer believe that he has a plan for our future and they believe he’s never cared about them. There’s been no empathy shown whatsoever from this Governor and no humility that when we did flatten the curve, he went on the national circus and went across the entire state claiming mission accomplished.”
Watch her whole appearance, it’s a doozy:
Pretty solid!
Quibis
Remember in May, when the Wisconsin Supreme Court nullified Gov. Tony Evers’s stay-at-home order? Now, the governor — who was the state’s school superintendent before winning the 2018 election — is now unlikely to issue any sort of blanket order about school reopenings this fall because he’s worried that it’d be invalidated by the high court, as well. Great stuff, hooray for democracy.
Kansas Congressman Steve Watkins was charged with three felonies after using a UPS store as his voter registration address for a 2019 municipal election. He was actually living with his parents at the time; incidentally, the FEC is investigating his father for illegally steering donations to Watkins’ campaign. Once again, Republicans are the only people who actually commit voter fraud and live in their parents’ basements.
With Jeff Sessions losing his primary election tonight, Alabama has finally taken down a Confederate monument.
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