A record-breaking number of Kentuckians have registered to vote this year, when Lovecraftian demon Mitch McConnell is up for another term in the Senate. A slight majority of those voters are actually registered as Democrats, too. In fact, only 9 percent of those registered voters are ineligible to participate in the state primary elections because they are not affiliated with either party.

Unfortunately, Kentuckians of all stripes will likely face some difficulty voting in the primaries this year, regardless of their political affiliation. As The Independent reports:

In a typical election year, Kentucky has about 3,700 polling sites, according to most reports. When Election Day arrives on 23 June, there will be just 200 polling sites across the state — with some of those sites having to serve upwards of 600,000 residents.

Voting rights expert Ari Berman wrote in a tweet: “There will be one polling place for 616,000 registered voters in Louisville’s Jefferson County, where half state’s black voters live.”

He added: “This is going to be a disaster.”

The State Election Board had previously postponed the primary election by a month because of coronavirus. But it appears they did not use that time to make any better plans for how to deal with the sudden increase in voters amidst a global pandemic.

Unless their plan was to sabotage the entire thing. Which is certainly possible, as Black voter disenfranchisement efforts have increased in recent years.

Mitch McConnell, whose approval rating after 35 years dropped down to an embarrassing 18 percent last fall, has 4 challengers in this primary: Nicholas Alsager, Paul John Frangedakis, Louis Grider, and Naren James. Read the rest

Mitch McConnell is terrible. I've known this for a long time, though it probably first came to my attention personally after his open commitment to making Obama a "one-term president," which was near a decade before he started gleefully referring to himself as the "Grim Reaper." But while it's been no surprise to watch his Machiavellian enabling of Trump, I've never really understood how any rational human could look at McConnell and see someone worth rallying behind. He revels in the destruction of all social fabric and proudly caters to corporate interests that do objectively demonstrable harm to human life. Even if you take Republican voters at their word about the things they claim to care for, McConnell still disavows it all.

Most private American citizens could probably reach a general consensus on the things that are wrong in Washington, even if they continue to disagree on the solutions — but Mitch McConnell embodies every single one one of those problems, and doesn't even try to hide it. Worse, he prides himself on it. He is a walking nuclear bomb, branded with corporate logos, who says, "Government is evil and will destroy your lives, and if you vote for me, I'll prove it."

I recently read (or more accurately, listened to, via Audm) two longform articles that really dig into the Lovecraftian horror that is Mitch McConnell's overall existence. And while I emerged from these articles with an even more profound disgust for the man, I have at least come to a better understanding of his special brand of nihilism. Read the rest

Securing Our Cyber Future, Stanford Cyber Policy Center's new report on election security, depicts a US electoral system whose glaring vulnerabilities are still in place, three years after the chaos of the 2016 elections. Read the rest