My last blog post about the June primaries featured an interview with Robin Long, Southampton Town Democratic Committee (SHDems) Vice Chair and candidate this year for Town Council. If you haven’t read it yet, take a look before reading this post so you understand who the candidates were, what positions they were running for and how a small group of conservatives forced primaries in both the Democratic Party and the Working Families Party. https://sites.google.com/view/theresistanceandme/blog?authuser=0#h.vd2e64k1v84
The votes have all been counted. This is how our local newspaper, The Southampton Press, described the results in the Working Families Party primary: “After the handful of votes cast in Southampton Town’s Working Families Party primary were counted on June 23, it appeared that Democratic candidates the liberal party had cross-endorsed would eke out narrow victories, but that was before the absentee ballots were added to the total. Last week, the Suffolk County Board of Elections announced that for the second town election cycle in a row, candidates backed by the Conservative and Republican parties had pulled off upset victories.” https://www.27east.com/southampton-press/conservatives-pull-another-upset-over-working-families-party-nominees-in-southampton-primary-1795985/
Once again, I turned to Robin to help make sense of what happened. It is a lot to take in. For that reason, this interview is divided into two parts. In this Part I, Robin discusses the results and then next week, in Part II, she explores the larger meaning of what happens to the voting franchise from party raiding and why it is so imperative that people come out and vote this November. Voter suppression takes many forms. Party raiding and corrupting the primary system is one of them … [more]
