blogging the special elections

Yesterday, after spending the afternoon and early evening canvassing and attending poll-check training over at the Tim Schofield campaign in Brighton, I wrote a blog post about the three special elections for open state house seats in Massachusetts tomorrow. This afternoon it got posted on Blog for America (what started out as the Dean campaign blog in 2003), so now I want to show it off :) They asked me for 500 words, my first draft was almost 690 words, and then I spent a few hours whittling it down (with some useful help from friends, including beah). The final version I sent in was 538 words and got posted in full. Yay!

So, yes, Massachusetts is electing three new members of the house, at the tail end of winter - two in Boston and one in Pittsfield. The votes tomorrow are primaries, but all three districts almost always elect Democrats, so the Democratic primaries are what count the most. You can read more about it in my post and the articles I linked to from there. If you're interested in how blogs played into these campaigs, read my comment on this dailykos diary.

Some late-breaking news: Our local anti-gay group, the Article 8 Alliance, has stepped in with some gay-bashing flyers in at least one election, targeting Linda Dorcena Forry. They're probably gonna try something against Tim Schofield too, since he actually is gay.

If you live around here and wanna help, we could use more volunteers! Tonight, and tomorrow until 8pm (even if you're working, 5-8pm is one of the busiest parts of the day in a get-out-the-vote drive).