GOP used Twitter "illegally" to manipulate mid-term elections

There is a new flak over the way the GOP apparently used bizarre Twitter accounts to coordinate polling data with PAC’s and “non-profits”, a practice that is said to still violate campaign finance reform laws.   The detailed story and video by Chris Moody of CNN is here. 

It’s easy to dismiss this episode as an example of hyper partisanship.  It’s rather silly.  And I have to add, sometimes I get very unwelcome approaches from people to become involved in partisan activity.  They don’t understand my lax “loyalty”. 

  

The story rings a bell for me because back in 2005 there was a debate on whether campaign finance reform could affect even amateur blogging.   Through a sequence of coincidences that now seem improbable in retrospect, this led to my actually stopping substitute teaching (as explained July 27, 2007).  In the long run, the FEC eventually said that “ordinary” blogging and web activity would not be viewed as indirect campaign activity, even though an appeals court had told it to look at the issue.

   

I’ve worked as an “election judge” in Arlington three times, although I haven’t done it since 2007.  I can do without the 5 AM start time and 18 hour day.  But it is a kind of “service”.  I wonder what the needs for election judges will be in November 2016.  The voter check-in process is now even more automated, as I saw when I voted Nov. 4.  I still know some of the people.   
   
But "Dem Republicans" act like a grad student who thinks his course grade comes from "a mid term and the final." Oh, I had a professor who gave his final on a Sunday, too (not Tuesday).