For anyone who missed the latest about Mark Martin yesterday, it appears he used his office staff and the State Capitol Police to intimidate Susan Inman’s campaign. For those who are unaware, the Secretary of State is in charge of the State Capitol Police. Martin had Martha Adcock, one of his staff attorneys, send a cease-and-desist letter to the Inman campaign for the heinous act of making it easier for voters to look up their registration information. After all, for Republicans like Martin, there’s nothing more terrifying than an informed electorate voting in large numbers.
To emphasize the grave implications of the Inman campaign’s egregious actions, Martin dispatched a uniformed State Capitol Police officer to hand deliver the letter.
Without getting too far off in the weeds here, what the Inman campaign was doing was extremely low tech. Instead of providing a link straight out to the Secretary of State’s voter registration look up page, they displayed the page in a frame on their site. This method can be accomplished with one simple line of HTML that looks like this:
<iframe src=”[Insert Link Here]”></iframe>
If I were to use that line of code in this article and link to the mobile version of the look up site, (which I did) you would get a fully functional version of the look up site within this page. Go ahead and try it, it really works – at least until they shut down the mobile version as well, making it harder for people to look up their registration info:
[iframe marginwidth=”25″ style=”float:right; padding:10px” width=”270″ height=”530″ src=”https://www.ark.org/sos_voterview_m/m.aspx/Voter”]
This was the horrible thing Susan Inman did, only she used the full desktop version of the site which gives a bit more information than the mobile version. In line with her well over 20-year history of doing everything in her power to make sure everyone eligible to vote can vote, she made it easier for people to look up their information on her website. <GASP!>
But I must digress for a moment…if you remember from my last post on Mark Martin’s mad digital skillz, you will recall he won the prestigious Digital Government Achievement Award. Impressive, eh?[foot]Yeah…not so much.[/foot]
Considering he won that big-time award, I figured I should really put their system to the test. Since I’ve embedded the look up tool in this article, you kids at home can follow along too! Let’s have som fun! Put your info in the look up above and check what district you are in.
Oops.
Ok…well, I guess that’s not terribly important. You already know all of that stuff, right? But hey, early voting just started so let’s see where your early voting locations are! We all know the Secretary of State wants us all to vote!
Uhhhhhhhh…
Powered by…the Orb of Confusion!
I’m guessing that award committee didn’t look at the mobile side of things. I mean, why bother? Not many people really use their mobile devices for much of anything except making phone calls, right?
To get back on point though, at the crux of the matter was Martin accused Inman of using state resources for campaign purposes. That’s incredibly noble of him to look out for our tax dollars like that! He would never use anything paid for by the state for the purposes of his campaign. No way, no how![foot]And he for sure would not waste $100K+ of taxpayer money illegally hiring outside attorneys, taking his executive staff on a $54,000 weekend retreat, or buying himself a car to use![/foot]
That awkward moment when…someone figures out what you’ve been doing.
Maybe he accidentally forgot state staff took those pictures with state equipment. Then again, there is the outside chance he hired someone on his own to take the pictures, and he is being generous enough to let the state use them.
But thank goodness he’s not using some part of the Secretary of State website to his own personal advantage in the campaign!
What? You want us to follow a link on your Facebook page to find our polling location? Ok! Let’s go!
How cool is that?! There’s a place right on the Secretary of State’s website to find your polling place! Since that page is part of VoterView, the tool for the public to use to look up election information, I would assume that you don’t have to be on Mark Martin’s campaign Facebook page to get there! Surely, you can go straight to the Secretary of State website and click on…
and click on…um…
um…
Well, maybe not. I guess that’s a special link reserved just for him to use for his campaign.
I think the letter he sent the Inman campaign needs to be returned to sender with a few revisions:
[gview file=”http://www.bluehogreport.com/wp-content/uploads/RevisedMMLetter1.pdf” save=”1″]