November 17, 2020 10:30 AM
Morning Reads for Tuesday, November 17
Good morning! Election Day was two weeks ago, and yes, Joe Biden is still. President-Elect.
- Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham: “Integrity in this office matters.”
- Raffensperger is sending an investigator to Floyd County, where the contents of an entire memory card from one voting machine were not tabulated. (Spoiler alert: Biden still won Georgia.)
- The devastating toll of COVID-19 on healthcare workers in our cities and in our rural areas: “The entire nation is on fire…there are no reinforcements to send.”
- Trump supporters and other conservatives who want a social media safe space are flocking to apps like Parler.
- Kindergarten enrollment in Georgia is down nearly 10%, and districts are concerned about funding ramifications of the decline.
- There are 700 volunteers in the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine study at Emory University, and researchers there are very optimistic about news of the vaccine’s efficacy.
- In which a spokesperson for Georgia’s Sons of Confederate Veterans makes an unfortunate comparison between the Confederate sites and the King Center.
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Gotta love the sensationalized “Loss of $100million in school funding” headline. If you have fewer students don’t you need less money? In Cobb County where the budget is roughly 50/50 state local funding we will lose state funding but the local funding does not go down.
Same local money spread across 4,000 fewer students means more $$ per student. And any state budget gap just reduced by $100 million. Aren’t those good things?
In the very short-term, like for the rest of this year, the drop in enrollment may mean lower teacher to student ratios (more theoretical resources per student). At the same time, there may have been cost increases due to things like making sure every student has a Chrome book or similar, which could have wiped out any potential savings from lower Kindergarten enrollment. And, fwiw, many expenditures are less liquid than others, like facilities. Those are more structural costs that don’t change quickly, regardless of school funding based upon enrollment. So, any savings is both very short-term and probably matched by increased costs.
But next budget round, the numbers will be based on counts including this past September, and after the pandemic, the enrollment numbers are likely to return to more average numbers. So the circumstance I believe they are concerned about deals with regular/full enrollment with funding based upon pandemic-related enrollment. That would be a shortfall. But…maybe most kids will still have access to Chrome books?
So I am guessing the new box of ballots would not be enough to change the percentages for the senate races so a runoff is still going to happen? I wonder if either Senator will call for a recount?
Quote from the article Teri linked: “It also isn’t enough votes to change state level runoff races.” And it wasn’t a missing “box of ballots”. It was a memory card though this also leaves me very puzzled on how the number of paper ballots cast wasn’t reconciled with the actual tally sent into the state originally. Gwinnett wrestled with this issue for a couple of days with my understanding to be the software working the other way around. They knew how many absentee ballots they had but the software wouldn’t let the reconcile it to the correct amount.
If the SoS is culpable on anything after all of this is said and done, it will be his complicity with the Republicans in the legislature for choosing these machine and this vendor.
I think Trump needs some neurological tests-dementia comes to mind:
“The recent statement by Chris Krebs on the security of the 2020 Election was highly inaccurate, in that there were massive improprieties and fraud – including dead people voting, Poll Watchers not allowed into polling locations, “glitches” in the voting machines which changed.
votes from Trump to Biden, late voting, and many more. Therefore, effective immediately, Chris Krebs has been terminated as Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.”
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1328852352787484677?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1328852352787484677%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fs9e.github.io%2Fiframe%2F2%2Ftwitter.min.html1328852352787484677
This picture has an amusing mistake.
I’m not sure if this is what you were pointing out but they have Georgia as a blue state.