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

Getting “20 years ago” memories on Facebook and dissolving into dust

Love clowning on Chicago, but our local pizzeria growing up in the Green Bay area also did tavern style

Go pack go

the #1 movie when you were 10 years old is how your 2026 is going to go oh hell yeah, making lifelong friends, growing as a person, lots of jokes along the way

What else could I be referring to when I say Beantown

Kansas election trivia - out of all the elections last year, who got the most votes?

I use the aggregator bookmarks.reviews a lot to find new books to read, and I’ve never seen a ratings spread like this lol

You see results this and want to know what the small town drama is. One candidate on the ballot, but they only get 6% of the votes

that's right

My wife and I both assumed we had seen the 60s Frosty the Snowman cartoon a bunch as kids, but putting it on for our daughter, we both have no memory of it. Turns out we were both picturing the narrator of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer

Villa are going to win the league

Interesting — a veto override in Kansas can only handle a few Republican defections, and it sounds like there might be more than that in the House who won’t back a gerrymander in the spring.

AVCX is great! They put out a really fun variety puzzle last night that was perfect to do during a middle-of-the-night baby feed. It was also my first time solving a pdf in the books app, which worked surprisingly well.

Instilling American pride in my daughter by insisting she call it “pepper pig”

Now that's a competitive countywide race, a 15-way tie

As one of the ~15 people who had a Seeso subscription, I watched this when it came out, and it’s so good

Backlash to the failure to call a special redistricting session in Kansas. Seems like a strong signal they’ll go to the mat for it in the regular session. sunflowerstatejournal.com/house-speake...

It’ll be interesting to see the dynamics of tackling this in the regular session.

Some good redistricting news: Kansas Republicans have abandoned trying to hold a special session to re-gerrymander their congressional map & eliminate Dem Rep. Sharice Davids. They could try again in January's regular session, but they apparently lack the votes in the state House, at least for now

A niche daylight saving problem: our four-week-old needs to eat every three hours, but we couldn’t set an alarm for ourselves for the second 1:30am.

Do you ever think about how lucky we were that Wild Wild West wasn’t a better movie, because steampunk could have gone a lot more mainstream than it did. We all dodged a bullet there

When the KS leg passed this amendment, they said the next section of Article 15 should be 26, but Article 15 only had 13 sections, it was the following one that had 25. It passed the popular vote, and the SOS version of the constitution now lists it as section 14. Someone oughta write a letter.

For some reason the SOS report from 1864 doesn't have statewide results for the constitutional amendment guaranteeing soldiers the right to vote, but every county return I can find was dictator-sham-election in favor of it.

Looks like one chamber in Kansas is ready to call a special session for redistricting. According to the article, though, the House is still around eight signatures short. #ksleg

Had a fun little pattern going on with @puzzmo.com and ruined it

Big things to come at my kid’s preschool

brew crew