Good morning.
Wednesday in Whitewater will be partly sunny with high of 74. Sunrise is 6:42 AM and sunset 6:53 PM for 12h 10m 56s of daytime. The moon is a waning crescent with 18.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
The City of Whitewater is holding an information session for a Fire & EMS referendum this evening at 6 PM on the edge of town at the Whitewater University Innovation Center, 1221 Innovation Drive. (Someone once said “neither do they light a lamp and place it under the dry-goods basket, but rather they place it upon a lampstand, and it illumines all who are in the house.” Advice worth following, even all these years later.)
On this day in 1780, Benedict Arnold gives the British the plans to West Point.
One sometimes hears (although less often than a generation ago) that one should ‘reach across the aisle’ to members of the opposite party.
How quaint.
In our time, the placement of that aisle is the consequence of voting rights restrictions and gerrymandering. The aisle has been wrongly and corruptly placed. Some are asked to reach out from floor space unfairly restricted to others on floor space unfairly taken.
Nick Corasaniti and The ‘Cost’ of Voting in America: A Look at Where It’s Easiest and Hardest:
The findings are part of the 2022 edition of the Cost of Voting Index, a nonpartisan academic study that seeks to cut through the politics of voting access. The study ranks all 50 states based on the overall investment a resident must make, in time and resources, to vote.
Researchers focused on 10 categories related to voting, including registration, inconvenience, early voting, polling hours and absentee voting.
The two categories given the most weight, according to Scot Schraufnagel, a political scientist at Northern Illinois University and an author of the study, were ease of registration to vote and the availability of early voting, both in person and by mail. The study’s emphasis on early-voting options meant that states like Washington and Oregon, where voting is conducted entirely by mail, ended up at the top of the rankings.
….
Vermont, for example, jumped “from the middle of the pack in 2020,” when it ranked 23rd for voting access, to “the third-easiest state by 2022,” according to the study. This was largely because it adopted a statewide vote-by-mail system.
Wisconsin went the opposite direction, falling to 47th from 38th, in part because the state now requires proof of residency on voter registration applications. The state also stopped using special voting deputies, officials whose tasks had sometimes included conducting voter registration drives, according to the study.
Cooperation across the aisle requires a deal between those who’ve been robbed and those who’ve robbed them.
The study appears below.
See Election Law Journal: Rules, Politics, and Policy. Sep 2022.220-228. http://doi.org/10.1089/elj.2022.0041.
See James Webb Space Telescope’s view of Neptune in stunning 4K: