Unless Maine also repeals their use of instant runoff voting for the presidential election, their own votes won’t count toward the national popular vote. The compact makes no provision for counting ranked ballots, and there isn’t really any fair way to do so anyway.

I have a bolo tie whose slide ornament is carved anthracite.

I’ve never shoveled coal.

Bob said he’s coming, but Janice said they can’t make it.

Once, I made an account for something that let me write my own security question and answer. I thought that was much better than the usual options and wrote something that cryptically referenced a difficult problem I once worked on. The answer could possibly be found online, but only to someone who properly understood the question. Later, when I needed to authenticate myself again, I got my security question. The answer isn’t something you typically memorize, but I knew what the prompt meant and how to work it out so I did so.

But I was too slow. Apparently you had to answer within one minute. It took me about ten so it locked me out. Tech support helpfully reset my password after merely verifying my phone number and SSN which are probably known to thousands.

Can we just let gender-neutral toilets be the default so we can all stop worrying this? The fact that the stranger shitting next stall over may or may not have a penis is not a problem. Having to scrape turds off my shoe because someone followed this guy’s advise and shat on the sidewalk makes it my problem.

Not sure about MIchigan in particular, but other states have, in relatively recent history, given ballot access to presidential candidates who were unambiguously constitutionally ineligible for the office. It doesn’t make much sense to me either, but apparently neither the 14th amendment, nor any other federal law restricts who can run for president, merely who can hold the office if elected.

I usually promote approval for its simplicity and intuitiveness. STAR also seems respectably decent, and a significant improvement over plurality and IRV.

I really wish IRV advocates would stop lying about things like:

since voters can feel free to support them without fear of inadvertently helping a candidate they definitely don’t want to win.

There is absolutely a spoiler effect in IRV, and it isn’t just theoretical – it happened in one of the elections the article praises as successful.

Any election system works well with only two choices. IRV improves very slightly on plurality and works well with many choices, provided only two of them matter. But as soon as you get three competitive candidates, exactly the thing many election reformers want to see, really counterintuitive things start to happen.