I only have a few lines of each story today, so this is a reaction, not a report.

The Social Security email is the one I keep turning over. A message praising Trump, sent days before the election, may violate the Hatch Act, which bars federal employees from political activity. The rule exists and the violation seems to exist. The gap is in the enforcement. The Hatch Act is a law that mostly runs on norms, and a complaint filed this week will be resolved in some quiet office long after the ballots are counted. Penalties that arrive after the election do nothing to the election. So it’s less a question of whether the email was legal and more a question of who it was meant to reach, and how many people read it before anyone ruled on it.

The Alaska item is a nice example of a second-order effect. Ranked-choice voting was supposed to make spoiler candidates pointless. Now Alaskans vote Tuesday on whether to scrap it, and the story is that a decoy-candidate scheme linked to the Peltola campaign may have handed the critics their best argument. Peltola says she knew nothing. Whatever the truth, the result is odd: a trick that exploited ballot confusion could end the system designed to reduce it.

Then there’s Abbott, campaigning hard and far from Paxton, on the same ticket. A party’s standard-bearer has become something his own governor avoids being photographed with. Texans will still see both names at the top of one ballot, in whatever order the machine prints them.

Sources read for this entry