Contact Sport

CNN’s coverage last night was all about the Democratic Primary election returns and the coronavirus pandemic.  The most sobering news I got last night was CNN’s Dr. Sanjay Gupta saying Americans were failing miserably at social distancing, a term I just learned a couple of week ago. Dr. Gupta was kind of hinting that we were headed the way of Italy.

America is shutting down restaurants and bars.  Church services are being cancelled. Movie theaters, concerts and stuff like that are on hold. HEB is installing plastic shield sneeze guards to protect their checkout staff.  Campaign rallies are gone.  You get the picture.

On conducting our elections, I put out a take yesterday.  Here is from Kuffer today:

As the story notes, not a lot of people 65 and older, who are eligible to vote by mail no questions asked, take advantage of it now. Travis County Clerk Dana Debouvoir puts the figure at 10-15% there, and I’d bet it’s similar in Harris County. We could already have a lot more people voting by mail right now if they wanted to. The HCDP has a program where it sends a vote by mail application to all of its known-to-be-Democratic voters and then calls them to remind them to send it in (I’ve participated in that), and you can see the effect it has had in recent elections. Thanks to the high level of turnout in this year’s primary we have a lot more Dems identified, and we could get a lot more mail ballot applications sent out. It’s up to the voters themselves to take it from there.

Go check out all of Kuffer here: http://www.offthekuff.com/wp/?p=94689.

I put out a tweet yesterday on the folks who want mail ballots sent to all 16 million voters in Texas for the May 26 runoffs.  Here is what I tweeted:

How do you determine which Party’s mail ballot you get if you didn’t vote on March 3?

Fair question.

We have all heard the term politics is a contact sport.  It has a different meaning in these times.   The folks who will be conducting our elections will be at the front lines so to speak.  They will be the ones who will be in contact with the public.   Commentary would like to know what they think.  How should we proceed?  What makes sense and what is safe?  We saw what Ohio did.

As far as the May 2 uniform elections and May 26 runoff primaries go, I kind of think a decision has been made on how to proceed.  The Governor has said a decision is coming very soon and the Harris County Clerk’s Office has sent her staff home.  Stay tuned!

It is being reported that Sen. Bernie Sanders is reassessing his campaign status.  Good.

I finally snagged some toilet paper yesterday.