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I think we can all agree that transparency is an important core principle of the American election system. Anything that gives the impression that something is
Lloyd Omdahl After every federal decennial census, the legislatures across the country carve out districts for the election of state legislators. In this process, it makes little difference whether the state is Republican or Democrat. This will happen in liberal Massachusetts and conservative North Dakota. The strategy is to get more than your share of the districts that will elect candidates for your party. District lines will crawl across the state and end up miles from the starting point. (North Dakota has five districts that violate the constitutional requirement of compactness.) It’s a...
Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota Chief Medical Officer Vaccines are the hot topic right now, as they should be. I believe effective vaccines will go a long way toward helping control spread of the COVID-19 virus. Does that mean over the next few months, we’ll all get the vaccine and then life will return to normal? That question requires a two-part answer. The first answer is yes. Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Dakota (BCBSND) is following Centers for Disease Control and Prevention advice and recommending North Dakotans get the vaccine as it becomes available. The second answer–...
Lloyd Omdahl Because I trashed the Electoral College recently, I was challenged to write a few honest words about the most commonly touted alternative – direct election. The whole discussion about the current method of choosing the president is akin to the problem in the 1787 Constitutional Convention when the delegates changed their minds every other day on the best method. A major difference today is 200 years of experience with the system so all of the warts are known. Over those 200 years, the political impulses became more and more democratic in that the people assumed a greater role i...