Good morning and welcome to election day! We hit on some of today’s big races in yesterday’s issue so if you missed that be sure to check it out here.

If you’re a regular reader and you’ve learned something here, please do us a favor and spread the love. Asking a friend to sign up is an easy way to make the world a slightly better place by making sure everyone is as informed as they can be.

We’ve got a lot in store today:

• Election day

• A very noncontroversial ballot measure in Ohio

• Moon exploration

• Public humiliation

• And more!

Here’s today’s edition of The Elective:

 ELECTION DAY 

What is election day anyway?

If you hadn’t noticed, today is election day in the United States. Four states will elect governors and/or state legislatures. A whole host of cities will elect mayors. And Rhode Island will conduct a special election for one of its two House seats.

When specifically is election day?

General elections for federal offices are always on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November — that’s the first Tuesday between November 2 and November 8.

• Congress controls when elections for federal officials (Representative, Senator, & President/VP) are held.

• States control when they elect their legislatures, governors, and more. They usually just go with the same day and year as the feds. That’s both easier and cheaper.

• A few exception are today’s elections in Kentucky, Virginia, Mississippi, and New Jersey. Louisiana’s even weirder — they do it on a Saturday in October (they used to do it in February!).

Why November?

When this was decided in the 1700s, everything revolved around the harvest. And this is the sweet spot. By November, farmers were mostly done for the season. So they could take time off to vote. But everything wasn’t quite frozen over yet.

Why Tuesday?

Congress didn’t want to interfere with the religious practices of most Americans at the time. People went to church on Sunday. So they couldn’t travel. And traveling to the polling place often took a full day. So the plan was to go to church on Sunday, travel to the polling place on Monday, and vote on Tuesday. Voting could literally be a multi-day activity (gross).

Why not the first Tuesday? Why the Monday thing?

If election day is the “first Tuesday after the first Monday in November” it will never fall on November 1. November 1 is a religious holiday for many Christians (All Saints' Day). And many merchants settled the previous month’s books on the first of the new month. So the first was out.

Should it change? Making election day a national holiday is a popular proposal. So is moving election day to Saturday. We’re going to avoid that today. But suffice it to say, proponents of both those options and leaving it as-is have sound reasons.

To find out if there’s an election in your area, check out www.vote.org.

 NEWS 

🔥 Abortion: Hot topic incoming. Ohio will vote today on a ballot measure called Issue 1. If passed, the proposal will enshrine the right to an abortion in Ohio’s state constitution by preventing the state from “directly or indirectly burdening, penalizing or prohibiting abortion” before fetal viability. The patient’s physician will determine viability on a case-by-case basis. Abortion in Ohio is currently legal until the 22nd week of pregnancy. This measure would effectively prevent the Republican-dominated legislature from tightening that rule. Issue 1 advocates got it on the ballot by submitting 496,000 valid signatures to Ohio’s secretary of state. While some states have higher thresholds for passage, Ohio requires a simple majority of 50%+1 vote. Six states voted on abortion-related measures last year. Pro-choice advocates won all six elections.

👩‍💻 AI: The AI wars continue. Days after X debuted AI chatbot Grok, OpenAI announced ChatGPT-4 Turbo. The new version will have access to data through April 2023. That’s a big improvement. But it still doesn’t compare to Anthropic’s Claude or Google’s Bard, both of which have access to current information. But Turbo does have a super useful improvement — the text input limit goes from about 3,000 words to 300 pages. No more reading summaries on Wikipedia. Now you can just feed it the entire ebook. Even more impressive is that individuals and companies will soon, no coding required, be able to launch their own personalized AI agents (Jarvis, anyone?). New features will be available to ChatGPT Plus subscribers ($20/mo.).

🌙 Moon exploration: The Netherlands and Iceland signed the Artemis Accords. The agreement is a simple framework for peaceful and sustainable exploration of the moon. The Accords are part of NASA's Artemis program that aims to put a human on the moon in 2025 (for the first time since 1972). Thirty-one countries have signed on including Canada, France, Germany, India, Japan, South Korea, and the United Kingdom. Who's not on that list? China. The Chinese are attempting to build their own base on the moon by the 2030s. And they've got their own international space agreement with Azerbaijan, Belarus, Pakistan, Russia, South Africa, and Venezuela.

 POLITICS 

House Republicans have dueling resolutions to censure Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D). Two Georgia Republicans — Reps. Rich McCormick and Marjorie Taylor Greene — offered similar resolutions . Both look to censure Tlaib for recent comments surrounding the tense situation in Israel and Gaza. Multiple fellow Democrats condemned her after she defended her use of the phrase “from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Tlaib called the phrase an “aspirational call for freedom.” But Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D) said it “means eradicating Israel and Jews.” The House failed to pass a similar censure resolution last week (also authored by Greene). A censure is basically an official act of public humiliation. The House passes it. And, hilariously, the censured Representative is usually forced to stand at the front of the chamber while a document slamming them is read aloud. Who ever said politics are boring?

Former Michigan Rep. Peter Meijer announced a Senate campaign. Meijer served a single term in the House from 2021-2023. He lost the primary last year to a Trump-backed candidate (who lost the general) after voting to impeach the president in response to the January 6 riots. His announcement sets off a competitive primary with former Rep. Mike Rogers and former Detroit Police Chief James Craig. Craig ran for governor last year but got kicked off the ballot due to Michigan’s difficult ballot access rules. Rogers served in the House from 2001-2015, eventually rising to chair the Intelligence Committee. Depending on who you ask, the Michigan Republican Party is...not doing well. They last won a US Senate seat here in 1994. Meijer's family owns an eponymous supermarket chain and their combined net worth is in the billions. The Republican nominee will take on the winner of the Democratic primary. That’s likely to be either Rep. Elissa Slotkin or actor and attorney Hill Harper. Current Sen. Debbie Stabenow is retiring.

 TRIVIA 

 BRIEFS 

🌊 In an example of force projection, United States Central Command (CENTCOM) took the rare step of admitting it has a nuclear submarine stationed in the Middle East. CENTCOM is the part of the US military responsible for the Middle East and Central Asia.

🙊 The former chief strategist of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, David Axelrod, made waves by seemingly suggesting Biden drop out of the race.

⭐ Apparently starfish have no bodies. According to a new study, those bad boys are 100% head. As if having no brain and no blood wasn’t weird enough.

👨‍🍳 Hulu and FX renewed restaurant-themed comedy-drama “The Bear” for a third season. If history is any guide, expect the new episodes to drop in June 2024.

🥜 Apple announced a new “Peanuts” feature film. The movie will see Charlie Brown and Snoopy take on the big city. The story was written by Craig and Bryan Schulz — the son and grandson of series creator Charles Schulz.

🐝 Bumble founder and CEO Whitney Wolfe Herde will step down early next year. She founded the company back in 2014 but their stock has fallen 43% in the past year. She’ll be replaced by the current CEO of Slack.

 QUOTE 

 ANSWER 

1. The Commonwealth of Virginia

2. The Commonwealth of Kentucky

3. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania

4. The Commonwealth of Massachusetts

“Commonwealth” is an English term referring to a political unit based on furthering the common good. Or the common wealth. The states that use the term were initially British colonies (Kentucky was part of Virginia), so they share a similar political heritage. There is zero legal distinction between the 46 states and the 4 commonwealths.