Absentee Ballots

Facts about absentee ballots:
1. Absentee ballots arrive at the Board of Elections  in a sealed envelope that protects vote secrecy;
2. Starting October 16, the County Board of Elections reviews ballot envelopes each week to verify voter's eligibility - envelopes remain unopened, stored securely;
3. Absentee meetings are open to public - at 2:00 each Tuesday until and including November 6;
4. Absentee envelopes are opened by the Board of Elections during a public meeting Tue. November 6 and counted by scanning the paper ballots;
5. Absentee vote count is not released to public until polls close;
6. Absentee ballots and One-Stop votes are counted before counting votes cast election day;
7. Anyone wanting to observe the process should attend the noticed absentee meetings each Tuesday at 2:00 pm October 16 through November 6.

Replacement Candidates And Write-Ins For November

There seems to be a bit of confusion or uncertainty about this year's general election ballot. The problems: write-ins and replacement candidates in partisan elections.

Normally, for partisan elections in November, the ballot lists the nominees of each of the approved political parties of North Carolina: Democratic, Libertarian and Republican. Those nominees are determined by the outcome of the party primaries held last May 8 for contested nominations. For contests where a candidate filed for a party but had no primary opponent, that candidate becomes his party's nominee.

Note that the party is the nominating entity. Unaffiliated voters are allowed to vote in a party's primary only if that party's State Executive Committee so provides by resolution delivered to the State Board of Elections by December 1 of the year prior to the primary election. In recent years, both Democratic and Republican parties have allowed unaffiliated voters to participate in their primary elections.

Winners of primary elections or uncontested filers will have their names printed on the general election ballot for partisan contests. Unaffiliated candidates can also be added to the ballot by petition (2% of voters for Governor in most recent election for statewide office, or 4% for district or county offices.) These candidates must be registered voters, but need not be registered as unaffiliated - they just aren't the official candidate of their party.

Just to make it interesting, it is also possible to qualify as a write-in candidate for the general election by petition. That takes 500, 250 or 100 petition signatures depending on the contest. When a person qualifies as a write-in candidate, a write-in line is added to the ballot, but only write-ins for the approved candidate will be counted.

There will also be a write-in line for every contest in a non-partisan election.

What if, after the primary,  a candidate dies, withdraws or becomes ineligible? In that case, the designated Committee of the Candidate's party appoints a replacement. If practical, the Board of Elections with jurisdiction over the ballot item will reprint the ballot. If that board determines it is impractical to reprint the ballot, then the original candidate's name remains on the ballot and all votes cast for the original candidate are counted for the replacement candidate.

This is all spelled out in North Carolina General Statutes.

This year, we have write-in lines for President and Governor. We also have one candidate who has withdrawn and whose party has appointed a replacement. Every vote for the withdrawn candidate will count as a vote for the replacement candidate.

This might or might not be the way it was where you come from, but it's that way in North Carolina.

Town Of Oriental Response To Appeal

Oriental Street Closing Appeal

Today I received in the mail the Town of Oriental's response to my appeal of the Town's closing of Avenue A and Request for Declaratory Judgment.

No big surprises.

Speaking Of Energy

Here's a link to a very good discussion of the economics, politics and technology issues of natural gas vehicles. With respect to energy independence as well as cost control, I go for an "all of the above" approach. There is no single silver bullet.

The Golden Feather

I'm really an old-fashioned guy. I miss the time when nominations were actually decided at each party's national convention. And senate filibusters required the senator to keep speaking until expiring from exhaustion. At least the public knew what was happening - no nonsense about the measure failing on a "procedural vote." If you are older than the baby boomers, you know what I mean.

One reason I miss those thrilling days of yesteryear is that presidential campaigns were mercifully short. They didn't start until Labor Day. Better for suspense (not knowing who the nominee would be until the convention) and the dramatic unity of a relatively brief campaign. I miss "favorite son" nominations.

And one thing we didn't have in those olden days was the indignity of so-called presidential "debates." Candidates were subjected to other indignities - Calvin Coolidge in a Sioux war bonnet comes to mind - but nothing like the debates.

I don't like them because they tell us nothing about the skills a person needs to actually, you know, run the government. I have no desire to have a beer with the president and certainly wouldn't decide who to vote for because one candidate seems more amiable than the other candidate.

It all starts with school elections of the most popular students to be homecoming queen. Being president is more serious than skill at sound bites. Or celebrity - or even popularity. Charisma is good, but not essential.

Columnist Gail Collins in today's New York Times got the debate ritual right:

"It’s a little like one of those fairy tales where the citizens of the kingdom pick their next king on the basis of a race to find the feather of the golden swan."

Patents - Good For Innovation?

A couple of months ago I posted some thoughts about the recent Microsoft win in a "look and feel" patent case.  It reminded me of some earlier cases that I thought were questionable. But I did express support for the idea of protecting intellectual property by patents.

Now I'm not so sure.

I just skimmed through an interesting working paper by two authors from the research division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The authors, Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine have written "The Case Against Patents," challenging the idea that patants encourage innovation. Instead, they claim that patents stifle innovation.

Economist Mark Thoma provides a link to the paper here on his blog, "Economists View."

Incidentally, I am writing this on a computer using the Linux operating system (free) and open source software (free) that is more stable and reliable than Microsoft's proprietary products and in most ways more powerful.

Boldrin and Levine make a good case.

I still like copyrights, but I think our copyright law has gone overboard, as well.

Weekly Reader

Sad report today from McClatchy - Weekly Reader is gone from the classroom.

I still remember some of the news articles. Most memorable was the two-page spread explaining the 1948 presidential election. It included the symbols for every political party and the names of the nominees. There were many parties that year with nominees, including the Vegetarian Party. That's where John McCain got his line from his first presidential campaign - that he wanted to appeal to every party, including the Vegetarian Party.

Eighty-four years was a pretty good run, but our children will be the poorer without it.