I mean, it might vary by state, and I’m not quite sure how easy it is to obtain the information. But I think it’s not unusual for this information to be obtainable.
I feel like a lot of that stuff should be confidential. Which elections I’ve voted in and whether I’ve voted yet doesn’t seem like information that should be public. I can see where the elections office needs it, but I don’t see why anyone else does nor why the should be allowed to snoop on me like that.
Yes, it definitely does. E.g., in MN you simply register to vote. There’s no political party affiliated with that. In non presidential election years they have open primaries where you get a ballot with all of the parties and choose which column ( party’s candidates ) you’re going to vote for .
In presidential years, they caucus, so then, I assume , your name gets associated with a party in some way. (I never caucused. I would never want to be associated with a political party that would have me as a member.)
Well I haven’t disclosed every state I’ve ever lived in on here, but two I’ve copped to are Oregon and Ohio.
When I turned 18 and registered to vote for the first time in Ohio I didn’t declare a party. On primary day I walked into the polling place and they asked me which ballot I wanted. My parents still live in Ohio and only vote in person on Election Day, bless their hearts. When I Google my parents’ names I can see party affiliations which are currently all Republican because I assume they all voted (for Nikki Haley) in the Republican primary in 2024. I’m not sure how primaries work if you vote by mail. I assume you have to tell them which ballot you want and they don’t mail you one each of Republican, Democrat, Libertarian, Green, Socialist, Progressive, etc. But I don’t know how that information is conveyed. I guess I could ask my friends in Ohio, but I am always harping on how bad vote by mail is, so I’m not even sure how many do and they might be afraid to tell me.
When I lived in Oregon, it was 100% vote by mail. There you declared a party when you registered. This was so they knew which primary ballot to send you. You could change it by contacting your county’s elections office. I think you didn’t have to declare a party but then you couldn’t vote in a primary unless there was something non-party related on the ballot, in which case that would be all you could vote on.
The texts I get are for fundraising. For that purpose, I don’t think it matters if I’ve voted or not.
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Jesse Watters said that if his wife secretly voted for Harris and lied to him about it that that would be worse than her having an affair. Which made me think to myself: If one of your employees had an affair with a direct report, divorced his wife and married said direct report, and then later at a work meeting bragged about letting the air out the tires of his now wife while she worked for him so that he had an excuse to drive her home, would you:
a) Fire him
b) Fire him and make his department have sexual harassment training
c) Call your lawyer to find out what additional steps to take after firing him
or d) Give him a promotion.
I don’t understand a world in which an industry leader thinks that the answer is d.
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Too bad Epstein isn’t around to see this.
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What would the comedians do now? They’re on Trump’s hit list. Move to Canada?
I hope John Oliver kept his UK citizenship.
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I wonder if Biden will resign, permitting Harris to become the 47th President (and ruining a bunch of Trump/MAGA branding).
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NIMBY folks need to be smacked around.
A newish (2021) state law here requires that towns with commuter rail stations zone for a certain number of multifamily units within a short walk of the stations. The town that I live in recently voted to do so, with the plan being quite reasonable: Some existing 2 and 3 story apartment complexes are now allowed to be one extra story tall, some largely abandoned light industrial buildings are allowed to be replaced by apartment complexes, and some single floor business buildings are allowed to be replaced by multi-use buildings with businesses on the first floor and 2 floors of apartments above.
So naturally there is a petition going around to hold a special election to block the plan. And presumably turnout will mostly be the naysayers as most people don’t care.
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I’m in the bar watching basketball. A group of boomers nearby is discussing at some depth why they think Trump’s economic policies aren’t well thought out.
Which sums up my city pretty well. The People’s Republic of Lawrence.
Maybe it is self-selection in action, but my trivia teammates and a few of the other folks that are regulars on other teams that we chat with realize Trump’s idea of the impact of tariffs are in direct conflict with what most economists predict. We are not in PRL.
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Sitting in on a Zoom presentation from a local chapter of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness). In between slides I looked them up. Based on some of the search results, some people say that NAMI is just a tentacle of Big Pharma, and some people say that the firstly-mentioned “some people” are themselves tentacles of the anti-psychiatry movement. So, I don’t know what to believe. 
NAMI good or NAMI bad?
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No direct experience, but a friend’s wife is involved with a county chapter. I don’t get the impression they are shills.
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dammit 
I fucking hate GCU and its resting-grifter-face president. (I have a personal axe to grind with them, as well as a still-pending borrower defense claim involving them, pending for over a year now.)
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Why am I still getting political texts? Like, honestly. Talk about leaning into a losing strategy.
Because there’s still money to be made. Won’t you give just $9.95 to help stop the illegal takeover of our government? That’s still less than a cup of coffee…even though inflation was so bad under the previous administration.
Because the most important election of our lifetimes is less than 4 years away!
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Well, 2 years from now, I’d say
Nah, no one cares about mid-terms