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As four Republican gubernatorial hopefuls consider their options to try and remain in the race, one election expert has floated an alternative path available to them.

Following the disqualification of former Detroit Police Chief James Craig, businessman Perry Johnson, financial adviser Michael Markey and businesswoman Donna Brandenburg from the Aug. 2 primary ballot, each has sought various legal remedies to restore their candidacies.

To date, none has succeeded, most recently with a federal judge denying Johnsons last-ditch effort. Craig, meanwhile, has announced hes started a write-in campaign.

The four were tossed off of the ballot after the Bureau of Elections (BOE) released a report last month detailing an unprecedented number of fraudulent signatures on their petitions.That ruling was then upheld when the Board of State Canvassers (BSC) deadlocked along party lines.

That leaves five candidates running for the GOP nomination: Ryan Kelley who was arrested last week on charges related to the Jan. 6 insurrection; Garrett Soldano, a chiropractor; businessman Kevin Rinke; right-wing personality Tudor Dixon; and the Rev. Ralph Rebandt. The winner will take on Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer on Nov. 8.

Steven Liedel is a former counsel for Gov. Jennifer Granholm whos now with the Lansing-based Dykema law firm in Lansing, specializing in election law. Hes noted that Michigan law does provide another path to getting ones name on the ballot that does not require petition signatures.

Liedel, who represented Carol Bray of Haslett in her challenge to 6,000 of Perrys signatures, says candidates could seek a nomination from one of the five minor political parties; U.S. Taxpayers Party of Michigan, Working Class Party, Libertarian Party of Michigan, Green Party of Michigan and the Natural Law Party.

ZERO valid petition signatures required, tweeted Liedel. These parties select their nominees for governor at conventions held by August 2nd and simply notify the Secretary of State of their selections for placement on ballot.

Liedel told the Michigan Advance that since these GOP candidates had issues getting valid petition signatures, mounting a write-in campaign like Craig is doing may not be the most efficient path to the ballot.

What are their options if theyre not on the ballot as one of the candidates for the Republican nominations? said Liedel. A write-in to become the Republican nominee, if you get more write-in votes than one of the folks that appear on the ballot; go get 12,000 valid signatures from voters [by July 21] and appear on the general election ballot as an independent candidate without party affiliation; or much like Gary Johnson did, seek the nomination of one of the other political parties.

Gary Johnson was a former Republican governor of New Mexico who became the Libertarian Party nominee for president of the United States in 2012 and again in 2016.

Theyve all said that theyre interested in being governor and they have ideas that they think should be advanced, said Liedel. And so those are the three paths that they have at this point.

Liedel said that of those three options, seeking a minor party nomination presents the fewest technical obstacles, especially considering that a run for an independent spot on the ballot requires 12,000 valid signatures, just 3,000 less than they needed to get on the ballot as a major-party candidate.

If past performance is an indicator of future results, they might have trouble qualifying with the lower 12,000 signature requirements that are applicable to an independent candidate in terms of securing the nomination of another party, he said.

Messages seeking comment were sent to the Johnson, Craig, Markey and Brandenberg campaigns, but were not returned.

He acknowledged that the candidates themselves may have no interest in affiliating themselves with another party, and that the parties themselves would have to be interested in having one of them as their standard bearer on a ballot in November.

Its not something that they can control on their own, Liedel said. Youd have to have a willing party willing to nominate you, and you have to be willing to be affiliated with that party.

However, he said if those ideological differences could be overcome, their names would be on the ballot for their supporters, while the minor parties would receive wider recognition.

Those minor party candidates are at least interested in continuing their minor party status, which means they have to get a certain percentage of the vote in the race for governor to qualify for the next election cycle, said Liedel. So the parties could have an interest in at least maintaining their minor party status and potentially achieving major party status.

Regardless of whether any of the disqualified candidates have a desire to seek such a nomination, Liedel says it remains an option that contradicts the claims being made in some of the court challenges.

I think that several of them, and Mr. [Perry] Johnson in particular, were arguing in court that there was no alternative for them to seek the office and no other mechanism for folks that wanted to support them, claiming somehow that they were being disenfranchised, said Liedel. And, you know, that definitely was not the case.

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Disqualified GOP gubernatorial candidates have options to get on the ballot Michigan Advance - Michigan Advance

Jesse Powell, co-founder and chief executive at crypto exchange Kraken, has responded to a recent New York Times article that said he started a culture war within the company as he questioned the use of preferred pronouns, debated who could use racial slurs and called American women brainwashed.

The controversy swirled as major cryptocurrencies crashed, while several crypto companies announced layoff plans.

The woke activist movement just ignores the fact that we have a business to run, and we have a bigger mission than somebodys individual personal preferences being met, Powell said in an interview with Fox Business Friday.

The New York Times hit piece completely cherry-picked little snippets of text out of weeks worth of conversations and reconstructed their own sentences in this hit piece. A complete misrepresentation of what actually happened. Obviously I dont think women are any less intelligent than men, Powell said in a separate interview with Fox News on the same day.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Powell, in an April discussion in one of the companys internal Slack groups, said that the debate over womens mental abilities was unsettled, and most American ladies have been brainwashed in modern times.

Powell made the comments after a Kraken employee in the Slack group posted a video, which featured two women who said they preferred $100 in cash over a bitcoin BTCUSD, -0.76%, while the cryptocurrency was trading at around $40,000 then, the New York Times reported. But this is how female brain works, the employee wrote then, according to the New York Times article.

See also: Celsius abruptly cancels AMA session as company navigates very difficult challenges

Powell also once told employees that he didnt believe they should choose their own pronouns, and in a separate scenario, started a discussion on Slack about who could use the N-word, according to the New York Times article.

In respect to the article published by the New York Times, we consider it to be an unfair characterization of events based on inaccurate assumptions formed by taking selectively picked comments out of context, a spokesperson for Kraken told MarketWatch late Friday. Every Krakenite is unique. We welcome and appreciate what makes us different, but all should receive equal respect.

Kraken this week published a document titled Kraken Culture Explained, which highlighted the companys libertarian views among other things. A previous version was shared with employees earlier and those who disagreed could quit and enroll in a program that would offer them four months of pay, the New York Times reported.

About 30 people cited culture or mission-related reasons for recent resignation, Powell told Fox Business on Friday.The company recently had about 3,200 employees, according to Powells tweet.

Kraken said it does not foresee adjusting its hiring plan and hasover 500 roles to fillfor the rest of the year, despite its competitors, Coinbase COIN, +0.33% and Crypto.com, announcing layoffs.

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Obviously I dont think women are any less intelligent than men, Kraken CEO says, after New York Times report said he called American women...

~by Janice Harbaugh for GreeneCountyNewsOnline

Just two weeks after learning the price tag on a new HVAC system at the courthouse has grown to $3.4 million, the Greene County supervisors learned of the need for a new communications tower for law enforcement. The price tag on that necessary infrastructure improvement is nearly $2.8 million.

During the supervisors regular June 13 meeting, John Marckres of Unplugged Wireless and Chad Gappa of Motorola Solutions spoke about the countys need for better communications with the Iowa Statewide Interoperable Communications System (ISICS.)

Marckres and Gappa described ISICS as a state-of-the-art radio platform used by public safety agencies, first responders, schools, and municipal utilities.

County sheriff Jack Williams described current radio communications as good while officers are in their vehicles, but lacking coverage when officers are on the streets or inside buildings.

Marckres and Gappa said there are more than 90 ISICS towers in Iowa, but Greene County does not have one. They said the towers make in-building communications reliable.

After reviewing a map of existing towers located in Greene County, Marckres and Gappa found none that would be tall enough or strong enough for adding equipment. They recommended a new tower be located in the Jefferson area to best fit into the ISICS communications system.

Macres and Gappa recommended a 200-foot tower. They estimated the cost for a new tower, microwave, fence, other equipment, and moving dispatch to the new law enforcement center at $2,795,294. They estimated maintenance at $288,381 for the period of 2024 through 2030.

This starts discussion, board chair John Muir said. Were 18 to 24 months out.

No action was taken by the board.

Jefferson city administrator Mike Palmer gave his monthly report on various city projects. He mentioned that Thomas Jefferson Gardens will sponsor farmers markets on Tuesdays, there are now flower planters in Arch Alley, and that the city is close to bidding out a water main replacement project on Russell St.

Patti Treibel-Leeds, representing Central Iowa Community Services (CICS), spoke to the board about a memorandum of understanding concerning the transfer of client files from Greene County to CICS.

The MOU ensures that ownership and possession of client mental health and disability services files generated prior to July 1, 2013, shall be transferred to CICS effective July 1, 2022.

The board unanimously approved the MOU.

Phil Heisterkamp, chair of the Bell Tower Festival steering committee, reported the Bell Tower Festival was very successful and he thanked the board for its financial support and encouragement.

County engineer Wade Weiss reported secondary road crews will be patching roads west of Churdan for several weeks.

The supervisors also acted as a board of canvass for the June 7 primary election, recording the returns for each voting precinct in the county.

Supervisor positions are up for election in November 2022 in District 2 and District 3. The board declared Dawn Rudolph the Republican nominee with no Democratic opposition in District 2. Dan Benitz was declared the Republican nominee and Mike Holden was declared the Democratic nominee for District 3.

Republican Katlynn Mechaelsen was declared the nominee for county treasurer with no Democratic opposition.

Democrat Deb McDonald was declared the Democratic nominee for county recorder with no Republican opposition.

No nominee from either major party was on the ballot for the position of county attorney. County attorney Thomas Laehn, won the 2018 election running as a Libertarian and will run as a Libertarian in 2022.

The supervisors later received a written request for a recount of the primary election ballots for the Republican nominee in Supervisor District 3. A special meeting was held on June 14 in the courthouse boardroom to consider the request.

Supervisor Mick Burkett was appointed chair pro tem. Election deputy Billie Jo Hoskins told the board James Hedges, a candidate for the Republican Supervisor District 3 nomination, had filed the written request.

After telephone consultation with attorney Laehn and gaining some additional information about the request, the request was deemed legally valid.

The supervisors unanimously ordered a recount of the Republican ballots in Supervisor District 3. The recount is set for Friday, June 17, at 8:30 am.

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Another $2.4M added to list of county infrastructure needs - Greene County News Online

The North Carolina Board of Elections finalized the primary election voting numbers this month. Political analysts are beginning to make sense of the data. BPR looks at the impact of unaffiliated voters in Western North Carolina:

About 20 percent of registered voters in North Carolina went to the polls for the primary election.

Thats a record high for midterms in a non-presidential year.

Depends on if you want to look at this as a glass half empty or a glass half full scenario.

Chris Cooper is chair of the public policy institute at Western Carolina University.

Its a higher turnout than it has been in the recent past but its not what wed like it to be, said Cooper.

The largest group of voters in North Carolina were unaffiliated - those who are not affiliated with any party. About 52,000 unaffiliated voters cast ballots in the 11th Congressional District which encompasses about 15 counties in Western North Carolina. Thats more than the number of Democratic or Republican votes. (About 41,000 and about 50,000 voters, respectively.)

That district had one of the most watched races in the country with a crowded primary against Republican incumbent Congressman Madison Cawthorn. The congressman has had a pattern of allegations including traffic violations, sexual assault and white supremacist sympathies.

In North Carolina, unaffiliated voters can choose to vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary. Across the state most chose Republican.

In the 11th congressional district on the Republican side, 40 percent of people who showed up were unaffiliated. That is the largest number in the state, said Cooper.

Cooper says that at the beginning of 2022 about 3,000 people switched from the Democratic party to unaffiliated. Over half of those voters cast their ballot in the Republican primary.

There is disagreement in the political science community over whether people are more likely to vote sincerely for someone who aligns with their values or vote strategically, explains Cooper.

It was a hard decision for a lot of people.

On primary election day, BPR talked with unaffiliated voter Curtis Collins in Jackson County. Collins said he thought about voting strategically against Congressman Madison Cawthorn.

I really kind of despise how we get whipped up into that game of voting to throw something instead of voting your conviction, said Collins.

Collins says he has voted for the Green Party in the past. The Green Party was on the ballot in 2018 but didnt meet minimum requirements in 2021 to continue to be included. Those over 9,000 voters were re-assigned to the unaffiliated party. This year, a Green Party candidate could be on the General Election Senate ticket. The candidates will be confirmed at the end of June.

Collins says he wishes there were more parties to vote for on the ballot. Part of his choice also came down to his vote in the Jackson County Sheriff's Office race.

It was a struggle to be like well do I want to get that Republican ballot to play that game. And I chose not to do that. I chose to vote for the person that I wanted to have the office, said Collins referring to NC-11.

The primary ballot rules can be confusing for voters. BPR spoke with person in North Asheville who showed up to vote for a friend running for Buncombe County district attorney.

The woman who did not wish to be identified said when she checked in she learned couldnt vote for her friend because she was registered under a different party.

I grew up Republican and Im a small business owner so, fiscally Im Republican, but socially I dont want to be affiliated with it anymorejust the whole abortion rights and the way things are going in the world today, she said.

While in the voting booth, she took time to cast votes in other races that, otherwise she wouldnt have turned out for.

I voted for mayor and whatever Madison Cawthorn is, I voted against him. I dont even know. Is he in the Congress? I dont know, she said.

For Cooper, it is clear that unaffiliated voters were a deciding factor in the NC-11 congressional race. He calls it a strategic two step. Remember those 3,000 Democratic who became unaffiliated?

[Senator] Chuck Edwards beat Madison Cawthorn by smaller than that number about 1,400 votes. So what that tells me is that sure most people are voting sincerely but there were probably a large enough number of people voting strategically to make a difference, said Cooper.

Edwards will now face Democratic candidate Jasmine Beach-Ferrara and Libertarian David Coatney in the general election in November.

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Unaffiliated voters had a big impact on the NC-11 Primary Election - Blue Ridge Public Radio

As a part of an ethnographic study on blockchain organizations, I recently attended two major conferences Dcentral Con and Consensus held back-to-back in Austin, Texas during a blistering heatwave. My collaborator, Johannes Lenhard, and I had conducted a handful of interviews with angel investors, founders, and venture capitalists, but wed yet to conduct any fieldwork to observe these types of operators in the wild. Dcentral, held at Austins Long Center for the Performing Arts, and Consensus, held at the Austin Convention Center and other venues throughout downtown, provided the perfect opportunity. The speaker and panel topics at both conferences varied widelyfrom non-fungible tokens (NFTs), to the metaverse, to decentralized finance (DeFi). At both conferences an underlying debate regarding the role of established institutions repeatedly bubbled to the surface. The differences between the two conferences themselves offered a stark contrast between those who envision a new frontier of crypto cowboys dismantling existing social and economic hierarchies and those who envision that same industry gaining traction and legitimacy through collaboration with regulators and the traditional financial (aka TradFi) sector.

Dcentral was populated by scrappy developers of emerging protocols, avid gamers, and advocates for edgy decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), such as Treat DAO, which allows adult content creators to sell NSFW (i.e., not safe for work) NFTs. Attendees at Dcentral sported promotional t-shirts and sneakers, and a few even showed up in Comic Con style garb, flaunting flowing white togas and head-to-toe blue body paint. Over the course of Dcentral, many speakers and attendees crafted passionate arguments around common libertarian talking pointsself sovereignty, individualism, opposition to the Federal Reserve, and skepticism about government oversight more broadly. Yet governments were not the only institutions drawing the ire of the Dcentral crowd. Speakers and attendees alike took aim at corporate actors from traditional finance systems as well as venture capital (VC) firms and accredited investors.

Perhaps the most acerbic critique of institutionalization in the crypto sector was issued by Stefan Rust, founder and CEO of Laguna. Wearing a white cowboy hat, he opened his presentation [see 3:19] with a criticism of protocols that impose undesirable middlemen between the user and their intended transactions:

This is what we want to avoid. We invited these institutions into our ecosystem and we now have layers, on layers, on layers that have been created in order to take a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash ecosystem to fit a traditional, TradFi world, the system that weve been fighting so hard since 2008 to combat []. Do we want this? I dont know. I didnt sign up to get into crypto and Bitcoin and a peer-to-peer electronic cash system for multiple layers of multiple middlemen and multiple fees

In his view, increasing involvement of institutional actors could lead to SSDD. That is, same shit, different day, which according to Rust, is exactly what the ecosystem should be dismantling.

Consensus, held directly after Dcentral, had an entirely different feel. In contrast to the casual dress of Dcentral, many attendees at Consensus wore conservative silk dresses, high heel pumps, or well-tailored suits, despite temperatures that topped 100 degrees just outside the conference center doors. In a panel aptly entitled, Wall Street Suits Meet Hoodies, Ryan VanGrack, a former advisor at the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), opened with a comment about how he felt uncomfortably informal in his crisp button-down shirt, slacks, and pristine gray sneakers. According to one marketer at a well-known technology company, the cost of hosting a booth on the exhibit floor was in the neighborhood of 75K. This was not the ragtag gang of artists and emerging protocols from Dcentral; these people were established crypto players who saw the pathway to revolution as running straight through the front door of institutions rather than by burning them to the ground.

Like Dcentral, speakers and panelists at Consensus called for the reform of the financial industry, often similarly drawing from libertarian values and arguments; however, unlike Dcentral, many at Consensus emphasized that regulation of the crypto industry is not only warranted, but necessary to expand its scope and market adoption. According to them, the lack of regulation has imposed an artificial ceiling on what the crypto sector can achieve because retail investors, would-be protocol founders, and institutional players are still waiting on the sidelines for regulatory clarity. This position was not merely abstract rhetoric. Current and former government actors such as Rostin Behnam, Chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) as well as Senators Kirsten Gillibrand, Cynthia Lummis, and Pat Toomey, participated in panels. These panels focused on the role of regulation in the crypto ecosystem, such as measures that preserve innovation while also preventing catastrophic failures such as the recent collapse of Terra, which financially decimated many retail investors.

At Consensus, advocates of institutionalization were no less enthusiastic in their endorsement of the mission of crypto and web3 than the anti-institutionalists at Dcentral. In other words, they too were true believers, just with a different theory of change. On Friday night I was invited to attend an event hosted by Pantera Capital, a top-tier crypto VC fund. I mentioned to one of the other attendees that I had attended Dcentral. His face pulled into a grimace. Why the look of disgust? I asked. He clarified that while disgust was too strong of a word, he felt that events like Dcentral delegitimize what the industry seeks to accomplish. Rather than being the true embodiment of the web3 ethos, he felt these crypto cowboys and their antagonistic rhetoric risked undermining the very efforts that were likely to have the biggest impact.

At the conference, panelists and attendees referred to Terra as the elephant in the room. But it struck me that personal wealth and its tension with the crypto vision was a much bigger and far less acknowledged elephant. Possibly the only speaker to directly and unambiguously call attention to this was Assistant Professor of Law Rohan Grey. In a panel entitled Who Should be Allowed to Issue Digital Dollars, Grey noted that as the resident pet skeptic he would act as a rare detractor to the self-congratulatory industry love-fest or circle jerk that would unfold at Consensus. Establishing common ground with the crypto community, he noted that he too supported efforts to resist Big Brother as well as Wall Street and Silicon Valley. But then he offered a withering critique of crypto industry actors, especially those with ties to the established financial sector:

We should be very clear about the difference between private, for-profit actors providing public goods for their own material benefit and actual public goods. So, who are the people who want to issue digital dollars if not the government? Were talking about licensed limited liability companies backed by venture capitalists, many of whom are standard Wall Street actors. Were talking about people with a fiduciary responsibility to a particular group of shareholders. Were talking about decisions being made on behalf of the public by private individuals who are there only because of their capacity to hold wealth initially, and those actors will then be lobbying for laws favorable to themselves in government and creating the same revolving door that weve seen with Wall Street for decades.

The idea that private sector actors who made their fortunes in the traditional financial sector could serve as the vanguard of a financial revolution certainly merits scrutiny. Yet, even if somewhat dubious, it is at least possible that these actors, having seen from the inside the corruption and ill-effects of existing financial institutions, could leverage their insight to import better, more democratic values into an emerging crypto financial system. Along these lines, one man I chatted with at an after party said it was his experience witnessing what he felt were morally reprehensible, exploitative lending policies while working at a bank that ultimately pushed him to adopt the crypto vision. Still, more than a little skepticism is warranted given that institutional or even anti-institutional actors stand to materially benefit from greater adoption of crypto and its associated technologies, a point that Grey himself underscored.

Following such skepticism, a cynical take is that people will always behave in alignment with their own incentives, even when doing so causes harm to others. I have heard people espouse exactly this sentiment when excoriating scams, NFT rug pulls, or even failed DeFi applications. Yet such a bleak view of humanity is overly simplistic given the body of empirical data about human prosocial behavior (e.g., Fehr, Fischbacher & Kosfeld, 2005). People can and often do behave in ways that are altruistic or in the service of others, even at a cost to themselves. Many advocates both for and against institutionalization of the web3 and cryptocurrency sector are likely motivated by a sincere desire to benefit their fellow man. But intentions arent the only thing that matters. The positive and negative real-world impacts of blockchain applications both direct and indirect are critical. Whether this increasingly institutionalized sector will spark a real revolution or further entrench SSDD remains to be seen.

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Dcentral vs. Consensus: Are institutions frens or enemies of crypto? - Freedom to Tinker