What the kansasreflector.com/2026/06/17/k...

The World Cup needs to always be in Europe and Africa. Morning games > night games.

Niantic Spatial's CTO quoted here was 9 points from becoming Kansas's Secretary of State back in 2018

Diana Forster, Dan Smith, and I have a paper that looked at invalid petition signatures for a city initiative, and the heat map glows in neighborhoods just outside the city boundary. Lots of people aren't aware!

There's been a lot of interesting stuff written about county seat wars, but I'm trying to code partisanship for state house elections. In Harper County's seat election year, it would appear the county slates weren't partisan, but seat choice-based, which are weird, one-off parties, I guess?

Arguing technicalities in a special election before the Australian ballot was adopted

If you’re planning to run for office in Kansas, you’ve got about 2 hours to declare. Happy filing deadline day!

What the.. this together with that GAF Christmas movie means there were two movies that came out last year shot in my home town

Random chart: when someone updates their party registration, how often are they *only* changing their party registration (versus, they do it along with an address update)? You can see spikes for the presidential and Aug primaries in 2024, and nothing for the non-partisan primary in Aug 2025.

Being poking around No Labels registrants in KS - they started a couple months after we launched IKE Lab and just finished, so we've got great data on their whole run. Mapped out all the party registration changes people had in that span, and some do it a lot. Two people had 8 changes in 2.5 years.

ASTON VILLA HAVE WON THE EUROPA LEAGUE! #AVFC

It was a good first half folks

Looks like I lost my party registration.

Reminds me how my dept had the new faculty hire lead a “how to get a job” panel, which seems like it’d make sense, except he was out of a top-10 program. In the Q&A someone was like, “realistically, most of us aren’t getting TT jobs, what should we do?” and he didn’t have a great answer

When your kids ask you about what you did during the posting wars, are you going to lie about your coward's choice to be on Bluesky

No Labels Kansas is weird - it’s an officially recognized political party of the state, but the bylaws they submitted when they registered said they’re only allowed to nominate candidates for president and vice president. People keep trying to run for lower office under them but the SOS rejects it.

I was wondering if there’d ever be a #learnedleague one day that was squarely in my wheelhouse, and it turns out it was Alt Comedy 1995-2005.

Some good news

Stared at this URL too long wondering why Johnson County had recipes on its site

There was talk of him running as an independent and doing a Greg Orman thing where Democrats got out of the way. I’m sure Dems are happy he did this. sunflowerstatejournal.com/breaking-ham...

The worst I usually feel about a book is indifference, but I hated Olga Dies Dreaming

Never once heard “Wisco” growing up there, and they’re ugly. That’s not how you connect with the city!!

Seems bad. sunflowerstatejournal.com/legislature-...

The Google app on my phone only pushes notifications to me about one topic: AL East baseball. I don’t know why and can’t figure out how to stop it, but I’m keeping up to date on the Blue Jays

Presenting at the Great Plains PS Assn conference tomorrow. We looked at uncontested partisan precinct committeeman/woman races in Kansas, and noticed that the men on average did better than the women with Republicans, opposite for Democrats. Holds when you control for gender makeup of voters.

I got Charli XCX, she’s a fuckin tank

The second chart reminds me of discussions in my American government classes about the Electoral College and the Senate. A common defense of their disproportionate representation is that it protects rural voters from urban voters, but a majority of rural residents live in the 15 biggest states!

Another reason to protect federal research funding

A roundup of the unofficial election night results from Kansas's special election day! Still missing results from USD 404, although local news is reporting that the bond measure passed. #ksleg

The second biggest municipal race in KS tonight is in Hutchinson, a 0.75% sales tax. Yes has a small edge so far at 51.3%. #ksleg

The early vote for the Wichita 1% sales tax just dropped, and it is not looking good. That’s 79% no.

The Kansas SOS office increased the cost of their voter registration file and advance voting list subscriptions by 50% last month ($200 -> $300). Bummer!

Tomorrow is special election day in Kansas! We've got 20 school bond measures and 6 municipal sales tax measures on ballots around the state, including in the city of Wichita and for Olathe Public Schools. Full text for all the measures is up on our site: ike-lab.com/complete_ele... #ksleg

Doing my first season of #LearnedLeague. Starting out on top thanks to my dominion over the alphabet

We’ve got the full text up of all of the special election ballot measures that will be held on March 3rd! ike-lab.com/complete_ele.... #ksleg

Probably should proofread this stuff before it goes on the ballot, huh

As a registered member of the No Labels Kansas party, I don’t get to vote in primaries, but I did get a “plebiscite ballot” today.

We have the complete guide to special election day in Kansas, which falls on March 3rd this year! 15 school districts will be holding bond elections and 6 cities will be holding sales tax elections. USD and city sizes, along with the amounts up for vote, are included. #ksleg

Always interesting to look up why a county in KS has a new clerk - Linn County's previous one resigned in October and cited harassment via extensive open records requests as the reason.

The Right Stuff

It is cool that I can look up the date I first registered to vote, even though I haven't lived in Wisconsin since 2009. (I'm inactive, obviously.) It lines up with fall break my freshman year of college, which I guess I went home for - I have no memory of that experience!

Bringing back memories of the bad old days of the internet where I’d abandon email addresses every few years once the spam got too bad. What is Google doing

Politics, too, seems like there's fertile ground for "hey what if everything wasn't scams"

I've heard "Mercator distorts Greenland" so many times (I had the West Wing boxset) that this had the reverse effect: Greenland is bigger than Mexico!

Just getting this joke

I didn’t look at the back cover of this book closely when I checked it out, and I don’t think I would have ever guessed what was on there.

Birchbark is owned by Louise Erdrich, who won the Pulitzer for Night Watchman, and her next book, The Sentence, has the main character working at Birchbark (and Erdrich herself is a side character) during the George Floyd protests. Worth a read!

Looking tough for Kansas Republicans to gerrymander Davids out of her seat. sunflowerstatejournal.com/hawkins-on-r...

Shoot, still writing 2025 on my checks