Bryon Eagon, the former state chair of Students for Obama, has decided to make a bid for the city council seat being vacated by Ald. Eli Judge next spring. Eagon announced his candidacy in a YouTube clip, with a conspicuous Obama poster in the background. In the footsteps of Judge, Eagon described safety as his priority, and listed balancing economic growth with environmental consequences, tenant’s rights and transportation. Pretty standard for the student political dialogue. Eagon’s only declared opponent is Jacob Schmidt, also a UW junior. Schmidt is a self-proclaimed Republican with ties to the Wisconsin Family Council, a social conservative advocacy group. That in and of itself should guarantee his doom on the UW campus. However, Schmidt does have something going for him: snow. He recognizes it’s an issue people care about, namely Tom Schalmo, Sam Clegg and me.

[A great op-ed](http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/opinion/04seife.html?ref=opinion) in today's New York Times discusses the possibility of Minnesota's senate race between incumbent Norm Coleman (R) and Al Franken (D) ending with a coin toss.

Even if all missing ballots are found and all the typos are corrected, the recount is still doomed. Just considering precincts where every ballot is accounted for -- where Coleman and Franken observers are not challenging votes -- there are mistakes. How can we know this? Before the recount began, the state ran a post-election review to gauge the accuracy of the voting process. The review involved auditors going into select precincts and, like the recounters, counting by hand, doing the most careful job humanly possible. So in some precincts, we have not just a recount but a re-recount. Both auditors and recounters were hypervigilant to possible sources of error, and yet they disagree on their tallies by about 20 thousandths of a percent. The Coleman-Franken race is so close that this error rate is more than double the margin between the two camps. Luckily, Minnesota's electoral law has a provision for ties. After all the counting and recounting, if the vote is statistically tied, the state should invoke the section of the law that requires the victor to be chosen by lot. It's hard to swallow, but the right way to end the senatorial race between Mr. Coleman and Mr. Franken will be to flip a coin.

The title is appropriately, "Not every vote counts."

In an interview with Wispolitics, Senate Minority Leader Scott Fitzgerald called the Democratic calls for federal assistance to alleviate our budget mess “a gimmick.” He refused to participate in pleas for help from Washington. What was most interesting of course is that when pressed on the issue, he said he would prefer a stimulus plan closer to what President Bush has done, which he hoped would get to the “grassroots and stimulate the economy.” How bailing out the largest firms on Wall St. really gets at the “grassroots” and federal infrastructure projects and direct aid to the states somehow doesn’t strikes me as counter-intuitive at best and blatantly dishonest at worst. Whatever qualms the Republicans have with big New Deal type stimulus plans in the long-term, it cannot be said that they do not work to directly stimulate cash flow to the people who need it most — the unemployed or the barely employed.

According to the Danny Spirn (otherwise known as the Critical Badger), Ald. Eli Judge will not be running for re-election for his City Council seat, which he was elected to during the Spring of 2007. Spirn, has yet to discuss the implications of Judge’s departure from the Council, but that should be expected in the coming days. Judge has without a doubt been a good force on the council, pushing through initiatives that almost every student benefits from, including the ordinance requiring landlords to show photo evidence of damages charged to tenants (I should have been more aware of my rights in this process myself). Earlier I incorrectly wrote that Spirn was Judge’s roommate. I apologize to both for the error.