Voter turnout in Virginia has been meeting expectations this Super Tuesday—sparse, meager and a far cry from 2008.
With just Ron Paul and Mitt Romney meeting requirements to be on the ballot, many voters seem to be sitting this Super Tuesday out.
The Richmond Times Dispatch reported that precincts were reporting scant turnout. As of 11 a.m., Forest Hill Presbyterian Church in South Richmond reported the highest voter turnout with 75 people out of an eligible 3,000 voters showing up to the poll.
In 2008, when Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were fighting for the Democrat nomination, many precincts in Virginia ran had such a high turnout that they ran out of ballots.
"It's meager in all caps," said Lawrence C. Haake III, the Chesterfield County registrar. "At 10 a.m. I had .01 percent" turnout for the entire county, "a little more than 2,700 voters."
Gov. Bob McDonnell and the first lady, however, did turnout to vote for Mitt Romney at Main Street Station.
McDonnell’s voting time was pushed back to 9:30 a.m, according to the RTD, missing a women's-rights protest scheduled for 10:30 a.m., which would have coincided with the governor's original voting time.
A McDonnell spokesman told the RTD that the time change was a coincidence and had nothing to do with the protest.
Absent from the ballot, Newt Gingrich, a Virginia resident, did not turnout to vote.
* U.S. Sen. Mark Warner tried to use his Green Eggs and Ham storytime session with preschoolers at the YMCA as an opportunity to teach his fellow-lawmakers in Washington a lesson.
It’s also about the fact that sometimes when your mom or your dad gives you some food, and you say, I don’t want to like that, I don’t want to try that, you should try it, because sometimes it might be good,” Warner said.
And now the message for the rest of us.
“Green Eggs and Ham meant that sometimes you’ve got to try stuff that at first you think you might not like. Maybe I can take Green Eggs and Ham back with me to Washington and try to see if we can get the Democrats to try some of the Republican ideas, and the Republicans to try some of the Democrat ideas, and just like Dr. Seuss wrote in Green Eggs and Ham, they might actually find that they like the other guys’ ideas,” Warner said.
* The Republican Party of Virginia launched a series of radio ads throughout the state against Senate Democrats, who have voted against the state’s two-year, $85 billion budget.
The Post reported that that ads will air through the end of the week on 10 stations in northern Virginia, Hampton Roads and Richmond.
“Unlike Washington, Virginia has a tradition of leaders from both parties coming together to do what’s right,’’ a narrator says. “But now, Virginia Democrats are acting like Washington politicians, threatening to shut down state government to protect their own political power.”
* The Virginia Senate rejected legislation in a 31-9 vote that would have given lawmakers the same raise that other state employees will receive starting in 2016.
The House already passed the bill unanimously.
Senators currently earn $18,000 and delegates make $17,640. According to the RTD, the General Assembly hasn’t raised its pay since 1987, when it went up from $11,000.
Proponents of the raise argued that with such low pay only rich people could afford to hold office.
The Senate did however reject an amendment Monday night that would freeze judges’ salaries at their currently levels.
* The Baltimore Sun had a staff editorial Tuesday weighing in on a federal judge’s ruling that Maryland’s limit on handgun permits is unconstitutional.
Maryland's restrictions on carrying a handgun outside the home have been among the strongest in the nation — and for good reason, given the death and destruction perpetrated by those possessing handguns in this state. So it is regrettable that the standard is now under threat because a federal judge, emboldened by a pair of recent Supreme Court decisions that have expanded the reach of the Second Amendment, has found a portion of the law unconstitutional.
