Election Summary 2011

Elections happened yesterday. Many issues and initiatives (along with local races) went up for the vote. Here are some of the highlights.

• Mississippi gives a hearty frak you to the personhood amendment. By a healthy margin, no less. And thus, for another year, at least, Mississippi does not have a forced flight of all the women inside to avoid the possibility of charges should they miscarry and to avoid having their birth control be deemed illegal. Sanity prevails on this issue.


• Ohio's union-stripping measure is repealed. Also by a healthy margin. Unlike the unrepentant Scott Walker, the governor of Ohio seems to have taken this rebuke as the message it was intended to be, and is backing off, at least for now, on trying to remove collective bargaining from unions


• Maine says they still want same-day voter registration, repealing a law put in place by the Republican-controlled legislature. That said...


• Generally speaking, the voters apparently want it to be harder to vote, with several initiatives and laws left intact or approved to require new identification where it wasn't needed before, which has the added benefit to Republicans, because heavily-Democratic voters tend to be the ones without requisite ID to vote. And that's without laws making it impossible for third parties to register voters.


• Washington State voters tell the government to relinquish their liquor monopoly. Spirits and Liquor, coming to Costco and several other stores in Washington sometimes soon.


And finally...


• The author of the Papers Please Law is recalled. Mr. Pearce stepped well beyond the bounds of even his own party in pushing for the anti-immigrant measures that he authored, and the voters in Arizona punished him severely for it.

Those are the highlights of the big things going on from Elections 2011 in the United States of America. What else is important in your neck of the woods?