It surprised no one that Russian President Vladimir Putin was overwhelmingly re-elected on Sunday. But the massive panoptic webcam network he set up to monitor polling stations across the country captured some unexpected visuals: snoozing cops, abandoned AK-47s and dirty dancing.
The Pew Center on the States released the details today of a study that found almost two million deceased Americans still have active registration on voter rolls. This puts the dead leaps ahead of the 51 million U.S. citizens who are eligible, but not registered, to vote.
Mitt Romney is going to win the New Hampshire primary tonight — but is he going to WIN it? See, it's no fun for political writers to simply declare a Mitt Romney victory a victory. What are we supposed to write about for the next year, if he just keeps winning every primary? Policy? Yeesh. And so Mitt Romney must contend with the "expectations game," in which folks with a vested interest in not seeing this primary season end sans hyperdrama come up with a random number that Romney must "hit" tonight, lest his campaign collapse entirely.
Well here we are, first voting night of the presidential season, and CNN is already completely insane, playing with ludicrous pastel penis holograms while Wolf Blitzer meanders around looking for some anxious correspondent to appear on a garish outer space screen and say nothing. Only in Iowa!...?? Let's get this over with.
1988 Iowa caucus runner-up Pat Robertson — that's still funny, isn't it? — is getting disturbingly cocky in his regular secret magical chit-chats with The Almighty these days.
Perhaps that ad for Vladimir Putin's United Russia that turned a voting booth into a capsule sex hotel worked a little too well, as a record-setting 146% of the Russian electorate turned out for Sunday's parliamentary elections. (The figures pictured above are actually those of Rostovskaya Oblast, a region about 440 miles south of Moscow.)
The voters of Derby, Connecticut thought they were voting James R. Butler to a second term as head of the town's Board of Apportionment and Taxation, which oversees the budget. But someone on the Democratic Town Committee put the candidate's name down as James J. Butler — which happens to be the name of James R.'s 46-year-old son. Well, the good news is that James J. won! But the bad news is that he has no interest in politics, and voters thought they were voting for his 72-year-old father. Now no one has any idea what to do next.
Here's Mitt Romney's first television ad! It is fantastic, in the sense that it manages to encapsulate, in the span of one minute, the entire Romney "brand": boring, wrong, nonspecific and slightly dishonest. (It's not so fantastic in the "at all engaging to watch" sense.)
Herman Cain's campaign staff say they've been raising money hand over fist in recent weeks, especially since his sexual harassment scandal broke. But don't be deceived: a wave of donations is hardly a sign things are turning around.
Here's a creepy sex video from Vladimir Putin's United Russia party, disguised as a get-out-the-vote ad. It shows two people sexing in a polling booth with the tagline, "Let's do it together." Well, this works, but perhaps the corollary would've been stronger: Don't vote, and get shot in the head by secret police.
Just one year after getting used as Pine Sol by Republicans in the midterms, Democrats and progressives came back to score a bunch of victories in the 2011 elections—in particular, two important ballot measures in Ohio and Mississippi. Here's a roundup of election night news:
The best part of any Election Day is reading the comical stories of chaos, chaos at the polling stations! For example: A voter's nose in Ohio has been bit today. It has been bit. Is this what American democracy has come to? No! It's always been like this.
Russell Pearce, the Arizona state senator who drafted the state's infamous "papers, please" immigration law last year and was rewarded with the title of Senate president, may, impossibly enough, lose his job today, in the first recall election of a sitting lawmaker in the state's history. Is Arizona finally getting its act together? Hmm.
Tomorrow, America heads to the polls for what will be the most important political day in our lifetime: The 2011 Elections. And after a whole 15 minutes spent googling "elections tomorrow," your Gawker Political Desk feels it has an expert grasp on all of the crucial decisions to be made. Let's check out some of the exciting last-minute campaign efforts of candidates across this sunny land!
