Category: Technical Politics

I don’t know anything about foreign policy, but I know that Russian tanks are rolling across its small southern neighbor in an unprovoked invasion.  It doesn’t appear from news accounts that “tension” or “misunderstanding” is at the center of the clash; the only question is exactly what Putin has decided to do. War is bad…

This is my first blog post so please bear with me… What Liberals and Democrats should be saying about the connection between the Russian invasion of Georgia and the War in Iraq: Russian foreign policy, specifically the recent military invasion of the sovereign nation Georgia would not have been possible in 2002. However, since the…

There’s plenty of “conventional wisdom”, but very little solid knowledge, about the effect of ballot order on voter choice.  Finally somebody with statistical competence has taken the trouble to gather a large dataset and analyze it correctly. The short answer is that being listed first is worth about two percentage points, except in partisan general…

Dawson Bell at the Freep is reporting that the so-called “Reform Michigan Government Now” proposal could be on the ballot in November. Anuzis has an editorial against it. Grebner posted about this at the outset, but didn’t think they’d get enough signatures quickly. They must have had scads of money to be done in only a few weeks! Dawson…

Advances in technology makes new techniques possible, but they don’t make a difference in our lives until somebody figures out a way to put them to practical use, and that use spreads to a significant number of users.  That implementation and transmission generally lags by ten years or more, so what’s “new” in a field…

I received a call today from a friend in the media, who asked me what I knew about a petition that’s supposedly being circulated, to amend the state constitution and completely change the process by which legislative districts are drawn, among other things.  I told him I didn’t have a clue. From the text of…

The Secretary of State has officially rejected the Dillon recall petitions.    They find a deficit of “only” 776 signatures, partly because they discounted challenges that affected the same signature more than once.  One interesting problem was that the number counted as pairs of “duplicate signatures” was reduced because one was actually forged, which caused the…

We’ve just heard the Elections Division of the Secretary of State has determined the petitions submitted by Leon Drolet to recall Speaker Dillon are at least 500 short of the minimum required.  Attached please find the preliminary finding compiled by the Bureau of Elections. A summary of our finding is provided below: Results of the…

I fielded a call from a reporter who wants to conduct interviews with the delegates, but Mark Brewer and the MDP haven’t actually released such a list, notwithstanding promises to do so. I told the reporter I didn’t have the list either, although some of the names have previously been posted to Michigan Liberal.  I…

A few days before the 2006 election, State Republican Chair Saul Anuzis sent out a taunting email, claiming the Republicans had launched a boldly re-engineered “Get-Out-The-Vote” drive, whose unprecedented effectiveness would push their candidates several percentage points above their standing in the late polls.  Saul believed he had caught the MDP napping, and he wanted…