"being elected as an election judge"<p>Is America unique in having so many elections and positions? This job title reminds me of the "Fuse alarm fuse" (which was the fuse for the alarm that checked if a fuse had blown)
It’s concerning that he wants to use the election judge role to “advance progressive causes.”<p>Election judges should be the most non-partisan role in government.
If you go through the election results there are actually quite a number of 1-vote write-in winners for this position across the various ward divisions - and a few with no votes at all. Quickly scanning through the hundreds of results I didn’t see any that even had more than one candidate.<p>Looking at the electoral ward division maps it’s not hard to see why: these political units only cover a few streets. There are hundreds of these subdivisions across the city. I’d argue that this is too minor of a role to even bother having an elected position for.<p>I suppose since these divisions are so tiny one might have a chance of knowing any individuals who might be running against each other, but otherwise, what criteria would one judge the best candidate?
Ironically, a judge of elections using his first act to call for impeachment of a candidate likely running in an election he will preside over is extremely inappropriate.
my dad once won a local elected position with one write-in vote, and he wasn't the one who wrote his name in. It turned out one of his friends had written his name in.
Jokes aside, I wonder if we're really seeing the long term erosion of democracy because people just don't care. You can see it in most aspects of the nation, from the NSA revelations largely being accepted in a sigh of hopelessness to the several social issues that have been in the news since 2014 and haven't seemed to move.
People just don't take an interest in the larger issues except to tweet their thoughts and move on. I wonder if, for example, when events like 9/11 or Katrina happened people were moved more to donate or help because they couldn't just say "thinking of the victims" in a public social media space and move on with their day.
And I don't think mandatory voting is a solution to this issue because people will default to laziest method, which would probably be whose name they heard the most. The big picture idea is how to make people care, and that is probably the biggest unsolved issue of our day.
Were electronic voting machines used here?<p>In past elections, whenever the issue of extremely hackable and vulnerable electronic voting machines was brought up, objections were raised that their use was too limited to make a big enough difference in the election. Well, here that's clearly not the case: the difference was so slight that such fraud could have tipped the scales.
...but the official results show that he got 8 votes?<p><a href="http://phillyelectionresults.com/Citywide_Election_Results.html" rel="nofollow">http://phillyelectionresults.com/Citywide_Election_Results.h...</a>
"Judges in the city are paid $100 per election they preside over" For a days work, that's not much for a one off job even by central European standards. It seems to me, that the pay should be increased.