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Tag: midterm elections

  • Ashley Swearengin Loses Close California Controller Race

    Fresno, California Mayor Ashley Swearengin lost a close race for California state controller on election day this week. Swearengin, a Republican, received 47.3 percent of the state’s votes, falling short of the 52.7 percent Democrat Betty Yee received.

    In a message posted to her campaign website on Wednesday Swearengin thanked supporters and campaigners. She praised her campaign for the close race and encouraged her supporters to continue pushing for their vision of California. From the message:

    After entering the State Controller’s race late in the process – just days before the close-of-filing – we had a truly remarkable run.

    Along the way, we built steady momentum and gained growing support from volunteers, families, small business owners, and virtually every major newspaper in the state.

    What an incredible surge of energy, activity, and support!

    We were also able to begin to tell the story of success here in Fresno. Yes, good planning and sound policy will produce lasting change. If those principles can work in Fresno, we know they can work across California.

    Of course, we came very close to defeating a 10-year incumbent of a state constitutional office, and that made some “defenders of the status quo” a little nervous. The AFL-CIO ended up spending nearly $1 million to defeat us.

    California’s state controller oversees the state’s finances and serves on dozens of state boards. The position includes administering California’s payroll system and accounting for public funds.

    According to the Fresno Bee Swearengin had campaigned largely on her role in staving off bankruptcy in Fresno. Her campaign loss means that Fresno will not have to hold a special election to determine the city’s new mayor.

    Yee has been a member of the California State Board of Equalization since 2004. The board is responsible for tax administration in California and is the only elected tax commission in the U.S.

    Yee will take the place of current Controller John Chiang, who has served the position’s two-term maximum. Chiang was elected California treasurer this week.

  • Where Do I Vote? Google’s Election Day Doodle Answers That Question With Polling Place Lookup Box

    You may be wondering, “Where do I vote?” Google knows this question is on many people’s minds across the United States today as the midterm elections are underway.

    Google is taking the opportunity to turn its homepage into a tool for would be voters, who may not know exactly where they need to go. Rather than making the doodle take you to search results for “Election Day,” which is a format Google often employs for holiday doodles, it takes you to a query for “Where do I vote?”

    That query doesn’t just bring up a classic search results page with ten blue links (fewer and fewer queries do these days as it is). Instead, Google gives you a search box right at the top for a “Polling Place Lookup,” which lets you enter your address and find the proper venue.

    Strangely, if you simply search for “polling place lookup,” Google doesn’t deliver this box, but lists a page from vote411.org. This is presumably the website Google would have traditionally taken users to before it decided it had to start injecting its own services and answers into as many search results as possible.

    In fact, for the “Where do I vote?” query, Google lists a handful of local results after the search box, followed by several “in the news” results. Then, the vote44.org result appears.

    Site owners are often distressed when they see Google placing its own stuff in the search results rather than sending them the traffic, but in this case, provided its supplying accurate information to users (it did for me), it’s probably fine. People need to know where to vote, and if Google can get them that info faster, then that sounds good to me.

    Images via Google

  • Lil Jon Wants Millennials To Rock The Vote

    Remember when MTV began running continuous campaigns to “Rock the Vote” in 1990? Despite super stars like Madonna advocating the importance of young people getting out to the polls, voters under 30 were still largely absent from the democratic process.

    In 2010, the last midterm election, less than 25% of voters ages 18 to 29 bothered to cast a ballot. Eva Guidarini of the Harvard Institute of Politics paints an bleaker prediction for the future. Her research concludes that 23% of people under 30 are expected to vote this year.

    Barack Obama seemed to fire up the youth in 2008. No doubt, young people were interested in being part of history by voting for the first black president of the United States. Millennial voting reached an apex in 2008 with 52% casting a ballot. However, by 2012, that number dropped to 45%.

    So what’s being done to change the apathetic attitude of the young? Rapper Lil Jon, Whoopi Golberg, Fred Armisen, and Lena Dunham are featured in an online music video called Turn Out For What, which is a parody off Lil Jon’s song Turn Down For What.

    The message of the video essentially asks what is important to you. What is going to drive you to the polls? Is it gun control? Marriage equality? Immigration? Student debt? Climate change? Lil Jon is “turning out” for the legalization of marijuana.

    So far the campaign seems to be working. “There are over 130 million people that watched the Turn Out For What video on YouTube, and our goal is to make voting as popular as the song,” said Rock The Vote spokeswoman Audrey Gelman. She continued, “We love the idea of turning a party anthem into an anthem for civic engagement.”

    The true test of the video’s efficiency will come on November 4, the midterm election. Although Gelman admitted that voter turnout across all age groups is traditionally lower during the midterm election because there aren’t presidential candidates on the ballot.