Tweeting this screenshot, because I'm not entirely sure this just happened. @GovJayNixon pic.twitter.com/avTNOi91LN
— Valerie Schremp Hahn (@valeriehahn) November 4, 2014
You had one job, social media director. One job.
Then this, which is actually important:
St. Louis County election officials say one election-day glitch today came early when some polling places began running out of paper ballots.
Rita Days, the Democratic director of election for St. Louis County, said her office usually plans for 15 percent of the voters taking paper ballots. The rest would use the electronic voting machines.
But for some reason Tuesday, she said, “we’ve had an extra large run of paper ballots.”
In Florissant, one man said he went to cast his ballot at the John Knox Presbyterian Church when they ran out of paper ballots. He said he and several other people were upset because they didn’t know how to use the electronic voting machines.
Days confirmed the man’s account but said 300 more ballots were printed and sent out about 9 a.m. today. She said no poll workers should be telling people to come back after 1 p.m., as the man claimed.
“We have addressed that,” Days said. “As we get low, we are printing.”
Again, you had one job. Personally, I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that having your police department act like the combination of a Klan rally and the Stasi for the last six months may have motivated more people to vote than usual. Speaking of Florissant:
A Florissant, Missouri woman says that police in Ferguson shot her in the head while she was leaving a rally supporting slain teen Michael Brown.
However, according to the Riverfront Times, the bullet that doctors removed from Mya Aaten-White’s head in August has vanished and police claim she was gunned down by unknown assailants in a drive-by shooting.
On the night of August 12, Aaten-White says she was leaving an event in Ferguson in support of Michael Brown and remembers a group of people walking in front of her, then everyone diving for the ground as shots rang out.
When she sat up, she knew something was wrong.
“Oh my God, you’re shot in the head,” she remembers someone saying. A group of young men carried her to a house where they called 911.
“Those young men carried me and saved my life,” she said of the group who rescued her.
Now, Ferguson police are trying to blame those men for shooting her, calling the incident a drive-by shooting in which Aaten-White — a great-granddaughter of jazz legend Mae Wheeler — was caught in the crossfire. Witnesses, however, claim that the volley of bullets came from Ferguson police.
Aaten-White was conscious in the ambulance, taking a selfie that went viral. Then in the hospital, doctors debated about whether it was safe to remove the bullet from her skull, which had stopped a bare millimeter from her brain.
When Aaten-White woke up from surgery, she repeatedly asked medical personnel when the police were going to come and interview her about the incident. No one came.
When she asked who has custody of the key piece of evidence in her case, the bullet, no one could tell her what happened to the slug they pulled from her forehead.
“Someone has the bullet. Someone has the bullet, and it was an officer,” said her attorney Marwan Porter to the Times.
Scalia’s new professionalism. This whole city is a cesspool.
Another Holocene Human
had to click on that tweet and I’m so relieved it’s just ass crack, literally showing some cracker ass, instead of Jay Nixon’s more typical privileged insensitive ass-showing that’s been going on for the last few months
Is MO going to get Medicaid expansion or have they decided they’re on Team South and not Team Midwest?
Another Holocene Human
What happened to Aaten-White was South-America level police corruption. Brazilification (term used to describe the increasing wealth inequality through the Bush years) comes home.
ETA: I’m sure her lawyer knows this but it’s quite possible that she was hit with a kind of bullet that doesn’t hold together when it hits skull tissue, so actually a shell casing would be necessary for identification, but FPD couldn’t be arsed to investigate or, as most suspect, they already knew all the casings were their own. Now they’re literally claiming “a black man did it”. What is this, 1990?
shelley
The photo was so dark on my computer, I had to read some of the Tweeter’s comments to finally zero in on the buttcrack.
Another Holocene Human
I loooooove this paper ballot story. “Step over here and use the nice voting machine.” “No thanks, I’ll take the paper ballot, ma’am.” Word has gotten around not to trust the touch-screens. Looks like an abnormal electorate came out to vote in STLMO today.
Why can’t you print extra ballots and shred them later? These goobermints spend millions on consultants to avoid holding public hearings when they want to do a road project but a few thousand on printing costs is just too damn expensive, you heard it here first.
Another Holocene Human
@shelley: It was a bright harvest moon on my screen. Mac running Chrome.
Eric U.
@Another Holocene Human: similarly, why are urban districts always plagued by lines when rural districts have nearly no voters at all. I volunteered to monitor polls and was assigned to a rural precinct, and we had 5 voters in 4 hours. They were actually counting the people they knew that hadn’t voted yet. They had the same number of voting machines as my, much larger, precinct. And there were two precincts next door. Meanwhile, in State College, there were lines around the block in some precincts. How is this reasonable?
Jamie
Things to remember, Florissant is in St. Louis County, which is politically separate from St. Louis City .
Mandalay
@Another Holocene Human:
There is a welcome trend….
? Martin
@Eric U.: Black people are so fucking lazy they even stand in line for 10 hours to vote!
Omnes Omnibus
The City of Madison is reporting that over 23% of registered voters had voted by 11:00 a.m.
RaflW
I was just perusing 538 (which I’ve basically totally avoided this entire season, only noting occasional reporting of what 538 is saying…)
Anyway, pondering the variables, I find that, if my first choice is not available (Democrats hold onto a narrow Senate majority), then I really, really want the GOP to have exactly 51 seats, including Greg Orman.
The scenario is slim: Dems (w/ King & Sanders) at 49, GOP (w/o Orman) at 50. So that basically, McConnell has to fellate Orman to get him over to his camp.
The GOP would have to own their incompetent, do-nothing Senate, but Orman could extract some moderating promises from the turtle.
Not that likely, but fun to roll around in the mind while I await the fast-approaching evening of terror. Halloween got nuttin’ on this year’s first Tuesday in November.
Mart
@Another Holocene Human: No to medicaid expansion. Nixon for it, but our State legislature is among the looniest of loons. Passing loads of ALEC bills modeled after the “Kansas economic model”. Same tax breaks for the rich, same ratings downgrades expected. Same race to the bottom as KS.
Have a couple smelly ballot initiatives. One is to destroy teachers unions; pay raise based on test scores, can get fired every three years. Usual Charter School grifter crap.
One is to handcuff how the Govenor can distribute funds now that there are no funds to distribute.
I am thinking of moving back to Illinois. Taxes are higher but at least could relax with the medical marijuana. But there is the issue of the hated Cubs holding me back.
rikyrah
tell me about it.
Missouri Buckeye
OK. Again for the non-St. Louis people.
St. Louis County is an amalgam of about 88 separate municipalities plus some unincorporated areas. Florissant and Ferguson (right next to each other) are two of the largest, and can theoretically support the infrastructure required of a “city”, including their own police departments. Most of them are so small that they cannot, and so we get the abusive revenue-raising police behavior.
St. Louis City is a county in and of itself and is completely politically separate from St. Louis County. This arrangement was initiated in the 1800’s by St. Louis City, so they wouldn’t have to support those rural yokels in the County, but lately the shoe’s been on the other foot.
Unification may happen someday, but if it does, Chesterfield will probably want to secede.
So, Ferguson police are not the same as St. Louis County police (think of them like a sheriff’s department). Most (but not all) of the bad behavior comes from the city level cops, but they’re the ones where you have mostly white departments policing mostly black communities, and they are also typically paid less, so that’s where the lesser cops end up.
Being in the media microscope sucks.
Edit. I voted with paper this morning. Didn’t have to wait. Pretty normal for my precinct, other than Nov 2008, when I had to wait for about 3 hours. (Yes, it’s heavily Democratic. Why do you ask?)
I still say if Missouri had had no-excuse absentee or early voting in 2008, Missouri would have gone for Obama.
Missouri Buckeye
@Mandalay: I got a letter-to-the-Editor published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch a few years ago, warning people about how hackable electronic voting systems are, how they are a waste of money, and saying how much better optical scan systems are. This was in response to a glowing pro-electronic voting op-ed that has been published a few days earlier.
Being in software development, I can say this from experience.
Eric S.
Dear FSM it pains me that my St. Louis Cardinals are in, you know, St. Louis.
danielx
Oh shine on, shine on, harvest moon, up in the sky….
I couldn’t help myself.
fidelio
@Missouri Buckeye: Yes, this. Two different entities, before you even get into all the communities in the county like Florissant and Ferguson and Chesterfield and Clayton that have their own city/town governments.
The smaller places are having trouble maintaining their tax revenue and bases to provide the level of service people expect, and are in many cases resorting to fund-raising by fines.
I would not say, though, that the government of either St. Louis (city), St. Louis County, or the communities in St. Louis County are more corrupt than the American average. What they are is under a very bright, very intense spotlight. Quite a few places would not come out of that sort of inspection well, and there’s a chance more than a few of us are living there.
sharl
Some tweets of variable relevance to the original post:
FYI/FWIW regarding that first tweet, Matt Pearce is now a reporter for the LA Times – and a pretty good one IMO – but he does hail from Missouri (somewhere around Joplin IIRC).
J R in WV
I begin to think that no insult is to strong for the Missouri Police agencies. KKK, Ok.
Nazis, yeh. Paid Killers, probably, but would do it for free if necessary!
Am I getting close yet?
Now, I will say that I am sure there are hard-working and honest officers in MO. But they are not a big majority, and they don’t dare to fuck with the crooked Nazis in their midst, lest they get framed for something like child pr0n.
And that, THAT, is a stressful job! A friend of mine was an honest cop in a small dept that wasn’t the most professional bunch of officers in the world. He’s retired from the government police now, and well shut of that bunch.
cpinva
@Another Holocene Human:
the type of bullet you’re referring to is called a “frangible” bullet, it shatters on impact, leaving nothing but tiny pieces, if that. not something your garden variety gangbanger is going to have.