I guess I was a bit glib about tonight’s storms earlier. My daughter was having a sleepover and everybody got together in the living room to watch the wind whip around the trees. The power flickered a few times, going out once, but nothing more serious happened here. But throughout town, power is out, and through West Virginia, news is trickling in that things are worse still.  And, because this is West Virginia, it’s worse everywhere in the midst of a massive heatwave. 

The governor has declared a state of emergency. I’m happy to post any updates if they’ll be helpful, but for the time being, check on your elderly neighbors, make sure that if people don’t have water and air-conditioning that they have a way to get some, and hang tight. The next few days have just gone from frightfully hot to downright dangerous for many.  

Food banks in Southern West Virginia are apparently in bad shape after last Friday’s storm. Trucks have been sent out looking for donations. I’ll update here if I can figure out how to get donations to either food bank. For the time being, here is the Mountaineer Food Bank’s website. 

When it comes to discussing Morgantown’s Vote By Mail program, we keep hearing from some City Councilors that it must be altered (if not outright abandoned). The reason for this, they claim, is varied, but usually focuses on a financial argument.

There’s no denying that 2011’s City Council election was far more costly than 2009’s. The 2011 election cost roughly $36,000; 2009’s cost roughly $15,000. That’s a huge difference. It definitely one of the answers that we keep hearing from City Councilors who want to suppress the city’s voter turnout. Ron Bane champions that explanation here. 

The problem though is this: if you take anything more than a cursory glance at the city’s election spending, it becomes abundantly clear that by almost any metric, 2011’s election was cheap. It was especially cheap if you’re calculate using the total election cost against the number of votes.

-2005’s election produced 1403 votes at a total cost of $20,068. Votes cost the city $14.30 apiece. 

-2007’s election produced 225 votes (that isn’t a typo) at a total cost of $15,044. Votes cost the city $66.86 apiece. 

-2009’s election produced 1467 votes at a total cost of $15,240. Votes cost the city $10.39 apiece. 

-2011’s election produced 3699 votes at a total cost of the aforementioned $35,832. Votes cost the city $9.68 apiece. 

Yes, 2011’s election cost more total, but per vote, it was a cheaper election. Keep the fact that City Councilors aren’t talking about cost per vote in mind, because these numbers actually get worse. 

City Councilors opposed to Vote By Mail (Jim Manilla, Wes Nugent, Ron Bane, and presumably Linda Herbst) that 2009’s election was cheaper, so we should revert to a model that looks something like it. That’s mistaken though. 2009’s and 2011’s elections are comparable because of the vast disparity in voter participation. 

Interestingly though, if you combine the numbers from 2005, 2007, and 2009, you’ll get 3095 votes. That’s not very close to 2011’s turnout (3699 votes) but it’s certainly closer than any of those elections got by themselves. It cost the city $50,352 to generate 3095 votes. Those votes cost the city $16.27 apiece. In other words, City Councilors prefer a system in which the city pays $16.27 per vote than one which pays $9.68 per vote.

Why?

The answer isn’t participation. We can be almost certain that participation will drop were we to revert back to older methods of voting. Mayor Manilla has proposed hybrid mechanisms of voting (in which those who want to Vote By Mail are forced to go downtown to sign up for the opportunity), but there is no reason to believe that 2200 (the difference between 2009’s and 2011’s participation) voters are going to go downtown to sign up for the opportunity. 

So then, if Vote By Mail is a more cost efficient way of producing votes, why abandon it? The only obvious answer is suppressing local voter participation. Why would City Councilors want to do that? To make their own re-election easier. 

Instead of candidates being able to reach out to their supporters to remind them to return the ballots that they’ve received in the mail, sitting Councilors are proposing that those candidates ought to be required either to get those supporters to vote in person or to get their supporters to request ballots ahead of them. Doing that on a large scale is difficult, especially if you’re already campaigning against incumbent politicians who enjoy name recognition throughout town.

Further complicating things is the city’s bizarre insistence on city-wide voting; that also serves as a disincentive for candidates running against an incumbent, as they have to draw votes from across the city, not simply from the neighborhood they’re proposing to represent. 

It isn’t in the sitting City Councilors interest to have voting be easier. They want it to be harder and more complicated, because that has the effect of reducing the competition they’ll face. Oddly though, three of the councilors currently opposed to Vote By Mail almost certainly benefited from it. It returned Manilla to office and represented the gateway for both Nugent and Herbst. None of them were on the council when the decision was made to go forward with the Vote By Mail program.

Now that they’ve each benefited from it, they seem to want to slam the door shut behind them. 

City Councilors Jim Manilla, Wesley Nugent, Ron Bane, and Linda Herbst should be ashamed of themselves. Their collective stand against the city’s wildly successful Vote By Mail program represents nothing more than a coordinated effort to suppress voter participation in local elections. 

Although they’re claiming otherwise - they’ll alternately whine about Vote By Mail’s cost or, more recently, the alleged danger of voter fraud - the plain fact is that implementing their chosen plan will result in fewer voters participating in city elections. The question that local media ought to be asking is why? As in each of the following:

-Why is better to have a City Council that’s less representative of the city’s people?

-Why is it better to have elections in which fewer citizens participate? 

-Why is it better to making voting more difficult? 

Needless to say, I don’t have any faith in our local media to ask these questions. But at every opportunity, these four should be pressed to explain why it is exactly that they want fewer citizens voting.   

jessyidk:

I’ve been here for 2 weeks and almost everyone I have met are rude as f-ck or bitchy.

It makes me miss Colorado more than ever.

I hope this person finds some nicer West Virginians. We’re really a gentle, reasonable people. 

I see that Joe Manchin is losing his mind about MTV’s Buckwild, a show that’ll be to West Virginia what the Jersey Shore was to, well, the Jersey Shore. He wants the show canceled, which it won’t be, because it portrays West Virginians negatively, which it does. That’s the point. (And in case you’re wondering, yes, I’m referring to this Joe Manchin.) 

The show’s trailer is here, in case you haven’t already endured it. It’s nothing more than the usual depiction of West Virginians, although this time, it features the state’s youth.

As a child, I remember being warned by a teacher about what the national media does to our state. “They’ll seek out our most embarrassing people, and they’ll put them on television, because that’s what they want to see.” 20 years later, not a damn thing has changed.

Is there an upside to any of this? No. There isn’t. The best we can hope for - and I think this is a realistic thing to hope for - is that Buckwild never gets the cultural foothold that the The Jersey Shore enjoyed. That show went on for multiple seasons; we’re left hoping that this thing tanks within one and that it isn’t renewed. That’s not much to hope for, I realize, but it’s the best we’ve got given how badly this is going to go for our home.

Because it will go badly. Between the jokes and the impressions and the jokes and the pointing and the jokes the laughing and the jokes, this show will routinely deliver exactly what Americans want to think about West Virginia, the as these things always have: stereotypes that reinforce the collective belief that there’s something wrong with us.

And speaking of that, can we discuss the fact that this show’s producer is himself a West Virginian? Although he’s hardly the first amongst us to profit from the state’s suffering, this particular treachery is noteworthy, if only because it represents a new front in the fight. Most West Virginians with disdain for the state only attempt to rob it blind; this guy is profiting from the same stereotypes that he’s almost certainly endured. Thanks for nothing.

In conclusion: ignore the show, pray for its cancellation, and never ever offer to buy the show’s idiot producer a hot dog. 

It never ends, sadly. Here is more about the show and what it is(n’t) doing for West Virginia.