Negative campaigning almost always drives turnout down, especially among people who do not know the candidates well.

Negative campaigning often does not help the person who most engages in it: the Mandel attacks on Butkovitz clearly helped Braxton gain traction, without creating a strong positive vision for Mandel. Ditto for the McCaffery attacks on Williams, which helped McElhatton.

Does anyone really believe that Philadelphia was some sort of Utopia when the City Controller did annual audits of every department, regardless of likelihood of finding much that is significant? Even the IRS picks and chooses in who it audits, so it can go after the people most likely to be required to pay more taxes.

I get, as do many other people, that there is a lot of anger in this city. But anger does not unite people enough to win the vast majority of elections. There have to be demonstrations of vision and accomplishment, and that was missing from all too many campaigns in the last election.

Let me call attention to the winning campaign of Diane Thompson, a constituent of mine, for Common Please Court Judge, who came in third for seven positions despite not being on more than a handful or so of ward ballots. She spent less than $35,000 on her campaign, a fact that should serve as a cautionary note to candidates who spent many times that and still complain about not having had enough money.

Not being endorsed after 20 years or so as a Dmocratic committeewoman, and a recent stint as a ward chairman, she had reason to be angry, but her campaign was not about anger. It was about positive change.

Her slogan was "The Courage to Care." Her campaign picture had in the midst of children of many different ethnicities. She campaigned tirelessly at neighborhood functions, as did her husband. Her daughter worked to build up online support.

She did not spend much money on election day expenses for ward committees. Her money went to small newspapers (disclosure: the non-profit newspaper I recently formed for the Lower Northeast and a chunk of the Northwest, Your Community Voice, received $300 for a full page ad from her campaign), countless inexpensive flyers distributed by volunteers promoting her candidacy, and tickets for various political and community functions.

She made sure everyone knew she was well-qualified in many respects: recommended by the Philadelphia Bar Association, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the AFL-CIO, the National Organization of Women, Philly for Change, Liberty City, numerous labor unions, and others, including DanUA here.

She also made sure people knew that she had been around for a long time as a public school teacher as well as a lawyer and a participant in the Good Shepherd Mediation Project, a community activist in the Olney Athletic Association, Morrison Home and School Council, and the Olney Community Council, as well as a Democratic committeewoman and an Obama alternate delegate.

In short, Diane Thompson made clear who she was, where she had been, and the general direction of her views for the future. Her campaign was not about how much money she could raise, or how angry she could be, but how much good she had done and would likely do if given an opportunity on the Common Pleas Court. The more she campaigned, the more she gained support, which is not a claim that all the other candidates can make.

I suspect we will be hearing many good things about Diane Thompson in the future, as we have in the past.

I was handing out lit at a polling place at Temple Beth Israel - Beth Zion and overheard/ slipped into a bit of conversation with Rep. Babette Josephs about the prospects of an Oregon-style mail in ballot here in Pennsylvania. It came up that though this was a system with a lot merits and that she had been investigating it as a model herself, that the PA Constitution is very specific about how mail-in ballots are handled as a result of the 1968 revision of the Constitution. Apparently there was some sort of battle over absentee ballots in 1964 that caused them to set the handling of absentee ballots into the Constitution. this is significant because it would require another modification of the state Constitution in order to implement an Oregon-style system.

After reading your other piece on the topic, I did some reading up on Oregon and it really does seem to be a system with a lot of positives to it so I found this bit of information a bit distressing.

Really I think the low turnout for this election is a serious problem.

I'm sorry about the distraction from the the topic at hand. Negative campaigning sure, but generally a discussion of issues, passions, etc. drive newsworthiness and interest in elections. Its far more likely that after the historic Presidential elections, the big ongoing battles aobut healthcare, credit card reform, torture and the global economic meltdown that people are partially just hung over on elections.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

Items one, four, and five on your list are city issues which are regulated by City Council. City Council can mandate what you are asking for. I would be very surprised if an effort to get bills introduced in City to achieve these objectives would not succeed.

Babette Josephs has already introduced state legislation to provide for voting by mail.

I was opposed to same day voter registration, until I campaigned for Obama in New Hampshire, and saw how it worked there. In New Hampshire, voter registration rolls contain a list of eligible people who are not registered voters, which dramatically reduces the potential for fraud.

I therefore will be introducing same day registration in Pennsylvania, based on the New Hampshire model.

When I want to know what the weather is like in the morning, I log on to nbc10.com. When I logged on Tuesday morning, there was nothing there to make you believe there was an election that day, ditto for 6abc and whyy. Our media has a responsibility to promote democracy and they are failing us.

You probably remember the report Jen or I gave at a PFC steering committee meeting a few years back, but we, along with Renee Gilinger, Marc Stier and some other folks met with Zack at 70 to talk about just these issues and asked for Zack's help. We sent a follow-up letter and never heard back.

A lot of these issues could be taken care of even without getting rid of the Commissioners. Though of course I think that is the end-result we should all aim for if nothing else happens. But I guess I feel like we need Council and the Mayor to show leadership asking for changes and then seeing what happens. Or I guess it could all happen concurrently, but I won't want to wait for the year (minimum) it would take to change the law when there is another important election (judges!) in November.

**eyes blinking, mouth agape in astonishment**

See the thing that is most insane about the intransigence on efforts to turn out more voters is that ultimately move voters tends to equal a higher percentage of progressive voters. Small turn out elections may debatably good for "party unity" but they are awful for D's ability to turn out voters for state-wide and presidential elections.

Thats perhaps whats most frustrating - how ultimately self-defeating it is to not do a better job of bringing out voters reliably.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

There is some research out there that shows lower turnout in countries/places that vote more frequently. So yeah Brady. Yeah.

I agree with redfox1. An awful lot of people concluded that none of the candidates were perfect, none were terrible, and it just wasn't worth the effort to sort out who was better than someone else.

The result was that the small number of people who actually voted were almost certainly far better informed than the electorate as a whole--a result which is not totally bad.

Certainly the winning candidates now have a duty to reach out to the broader electorate to create a strong Democratic victory. Control of three appellate courts is at stake in this election, as is the chance to have a progressive district attorney.

Races in which the Democrats nominate a black candidate are the only ones the Republican even bother, at times, to meaningfully contest. The first Democrat to be nominated for District Attorney, former Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Willians, was upset by current Supreme Court Chief Justice Ron Castille in 1985. Getting the Democratic turnout as high as possible will make a repeat of that outcome highly unlikely, as the Republican registration in Philadelphia now stands at 12.75%--and steadily sinking.