September 30, 2020 | Letter No. 15
Tom Gill is out. Hai Huynh is in.
Tuesday night, Coralville held a special election to fill a one-year vacancy left after Gill’s resignation. While there were some problems with the software the Johnson County Auditor’s Office uses to report election results, Auditor Travis Weipert took to Twitter (my actual love language) delivering the results via tweet:
Hai Huynh, a community project coordinator at the Coralville Food Pantry, carried 951 votes (52% of the vote).
Barry Bedford, a retired Coralville Police Chief, carried 644 votes (36%).
Nick Burrell, the owner of Versa Fitness, carried 200 votes (22%).
Heather Seitsinger carried 16 votes (<1%)
Born in Vietnam, Huynh and her parents immigrated to the United States in December 1993. She graduated from Mount Pleasant High School in 1997 and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics from the University of Iowa in 2002.
In 2018, after her youngest child began school fulltime, she worked as a paraeducator at Coralville Central Elementary before beginning work at the food pantry.
While there was no issue collecting or tabulating results, there was an issue displaying the full precinct results on the website. If you cover a Johnson County election, the auditor’s office makes it pretty easy to get the results. They put out a link to an election result page and journos like me use that rare skill we are uniquely armed with: we click the refresh button over and over and over waiting for the results to roll in. But as of 9:30 p.m. my browser still showed zero precincts reporting; this despite the auditor having reported the results on Twitter.
On a call Tuesday night, Weipert reiterated that “everything else worked fine.” The only problem was that the website wasn’t showing the precinct breakdown for some. He said IT would look into the “glitch” in the morning.
What debate?
While anxiously hitting the refresh button, I got 3 or 4 messages about what I was thinking about the debate. And to be clear, I super don’t care.
The United States Presidential Election could not be more important. I plan to vote Nov. 3. And you should make a plan to vote too.
But having watched U.S. Senator Joni Ernst and Theresa Greenfield refuse to take questions head-on in Monday’s PBS debate, I am just not in a mood to see it happen in front of a larger audience and for a larger office. Go ahead and count how many times, either candidate hears a question and while barely acknowledging the question pivots to what they really want to talk about. Go see how many times moderators got them back on topic or cut them off from slinging a potshot across the table.
It’s exhausting.
It’s hard work putting on debates. It’s hard work participating in one. But aside from the spectacle, I’m just not sure what we hope to gain from them. We learn how flappable a candidate is. We sometimes see them crumble or shine. At their best, we see a side-by-side comparison on how they compare on cross-cutting issues.
Is that why so many tuned in to Tuesday’s presidential debate? Did we want to see how candidates for our highest office compared on issues? Or did we want a boxing match?
Debates are great T.V.; debates are lousy teachers.
I think I’ll stick with my special election.
Take err… Four
🏭 Okay, if you want to read about the theater of the damn debate, at least read about its stage. Trump and Biden debated in Cleveland, OH. Chinenye Nkemere and Bethany Studenic write for Belt Magazine (a MUST read), “if we want to solve the problems plaguing this country, Cleveland is the place to start.”
🎭 A Muscatine Community College dean censored an instructor from putting on a production of Dog Sees God: Confessions of a Teenage Blockhead. I play is an intense reimagining of the Peanuts growing-up, dealing with the rabid death of CB’s dog Snoopy.
🙃 The White House coronavirus task force reports Iowa is in a “vulnerable” position heading into the winter months. Gov. Kim Reynolds, by comparison, spent the morning explaining to the press how community spread in northwest Iowa—that thing we were trying to avoid back in March—is just Iowa getting back to normal.
🌳 It’s not local, but it’s what’s in my ears. In 2016 a popular teenager disappeared in the tiny Panhandle community of Canadian, Texas. Two years later, his remains were discovered beneath a tree outside of town. Texas Monthly’s new podcast from Skip Hollandsworth is looking at what happened to the town in its aftermath. Chapter 1 just came out.
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Zachary Oren Smith writes about government, growth and development for the Iowa City Press-Citizen. Reach him at zsmith@press-citizen.com, at 319 -339-7354 or on Twitter via @Zacharyos.