Posts Tagged: elections
News
In our culture, conspiracy theories are running rampant, and elections seem to be particularly prone to the craziest among them. Republicans, led by the president, have claimed that vote-by-mail is unsafe, non-citizens are registered to vote and casting ballots. Ballot “harvesting” is causing rampant voter fraud, President Trump says, and the system is being rigged against him. Even Attorney General Bill Barr claimed, incorrectly, that vote-by-mail eliminates the secret nature of voting in the US.
News
Pushing back the census deadlines could have a profound political impact on California, ultimately forcing the state to draw scores of political districts for the 2022 elections within a tiny, two-week window. The Trump administration’s plan, announced earlier by Census Bureau Director Steven Dillingham, calls for a 120-day delay in developing and reporting the finished data.
Analysis
California has become a model for non-partisan, transparent, open and fair redistricting. The state commission’s focus on legitimate redistricting practices — like enforcing the Voting Rights Act, preserving communities of interest, reducing any splitting of cities and counties, even drawing lines without regard to partisanship or incumbency — have earned praise among policymakers and researchers around the country.
Podcast
California political data guru Paul Mitchell joins Capitol Weekly’s John Howard and Tim Foster to talk about — what else? — the 2020 elections. Who’s up, who’s down and who’s burning through their dough?
News
There are plenty of things to look at now that California counties have updated their voter files with the 2018 general election vote history. This is our first chance to see what really happened, as opposed to what people thought had happened based on the outcomes.
Podcast
Here it is, Dec. 11, and the final count of ballots cast in California’s Nov. 6 general election was certified less than a week ago. And, as Jim Brulte and Kevin McCarthy have sadly noted, many GOP Election Night “wins” fell to Democrats as the final votes were tallied.
News
A number of California’s Republican-held House seats face fierce challenges from Democrats, and the tally of votes in these tight races may not be completed for days, even weeks, following the election. That’s the message in Capitol Weekly’s survey of more than 20,000 mail-in voters across California who cast their ballots prior to election day.
News
A Capitol Weekly survey of California’s early vote-by-mail balloting shows Democrats Gavin Newsom and Dianne Feinstein ahead by double-digit margins in their races for governor and U.S. Senate, respectively. Regarding three of California’s most controversial ballot propositions, the most closely divided was Proposition 6, which would repeal the state’s newly imposed fuel tax: 42 percent opposed the repeal, 38 percent favored it.
Analysis
Literally minutes after Donald Trump’s election in 2016, political pundits, consultants and prospective candidates started a march toward the mid-term elections. The expectations were set extremely high, with Democratic hopes of taking back the House of Representatives led, in part, by a huge gain in the limited number of remaining Republican-held congressional seats in California.
News
With the close of the 2018 primary election cycle, we get another chance to see how campaigns have evolved under California’s top-two open primary system. The most noteworthy change appears to be the manner by which campaigns are extending their reach across the partisan aisle. But they are not doing it in the way that the authors of the Top Two Candidates Open Primary Act, which took effect in 2011, intended.
A photo illustration of whisper campaigns and conspiracies. (Image: Valery Sidelnykov, via Shutterstock)
