Voting for the June primaries began last weekend.
But Jon Ralston and Steve Sebelius, political contributors/commentators for KNPR News, don't agree on whether it's a good thing or bad.
The two talk about that on KNPR's State of Nevada. Ralston also delves into the possibility of Sheldon Adelson, a conservative campaign contributor, setting up a super-PAC for Republican Donald Trump.
In addition, Sebelius talks about why it is still relevant to talk about Michele Fiore's comments about pointing guns at law enforcement officers if they point a gun at you.
And mistakes. We all make them. Sebelius had a few this week. And Ralston has been accused of reporting that chairs were thrown at the state Democratic Convention a few weeks ago.
How do they happen? And what about those chairs?
INTERVIEW HIGHLIGHTS:
On early voting:
Ralston: I happen to believe that voting should not be tossed away before you have all the information. You do not have all the information about all the candidates. You should wait, scan those late-breaking, character-revealing incidents, either positive or negative. There is almost no good reason to early vote.
It doesn’t make sense to me that you would not want all of the information. There are a few reasons why people early vote, but none of them good. One of the reasons people vote early is they may have to wait in a line. Or two, they’re sick of getting robocalled and they figure if they vote they’ll stop being robocalled. Of course, they won’t, they’ll still be robocalled by exit pollers.
Sebelius: I think early voting is excellent. I think the easier and more convenient we can make voting the better, if our goal is to increase turnout. Anything we can do to facilitate voting we should definitely do it.
There are somethings that break late. Probably the most famous example is when Gov. Jim Gibbons was accused of trying to assault a cocktail waitress on Oct. 13 (2006) about two or three weeks before Election Day that was kind of a late breaking thing. Gov. Gibbons won notwithstanding the revelations and the investigation and the headlines related to that scandal.
On Michele Fiore and her latest comments about guns:
Sebelius: I think that what Michele Fiore said had the potential to be very dangerous. She was speaking only for herself but there are a lot of people who follow her, who consider her to be a leader. I thought that the idea that you would encourage anyone to offer armed resistance to a police officer, whether that police officer is local, state or federal or whatever, to me seemed very dangerous. It seemed like a prescription for getting people injured and killed. I thought we have got to call this out. It has to be identified as wrong and people need to know about it.
Ralston: She likes to portray herself as pro-gun. She is on the extreme fringe on that debate. What she said was outrageous and scary. What was most revealing about what Michele Fiore did was after that, when she essentially tried to change what she had said and isolate it to BLM personnel is not what she said to Steve.
She’s not pro-gun! She is a rabid, frothing, dangerous, armed person -- who puts out Christmas cards with 5 year old’s armed -- who takes pictures of herself armed -- who talked about if Culinary Union protesters were in Brooklyn and she was there, she would have shot them in the head. This is totally out of the mainstream.
The only good news about this is that on June 14 her political career is essentially going to come to an end.
On Adelson’s support of Donald Trump through a super PAC:
Ralston: The question is: Why does a billionaire – if Donald Trump really is a billionaire – need that kind of help? But the answer is in the question. Sheldon Adelson wants to be a player in presidential politics. Let’s wait and see how much he gives… Adelson appears not to just be giving a perfunctory endorsement of Donald Trump, but he’s going to go at least all out or whatever it takes… to try to elect Trump. Let’s see if he follows through.
On corrections:
Sebelius: I have found as you go about doing your reporting and your research that it is not the things that you don’t know that turn out to get you – it’s the things that you think you know. And because you think you know them, you don’t double check them.
I will be writing something and I will actually stop the writing and go and look something up either on Google or the dictionary to try to make sure that I know what that thing is. But so many times you write something you think you know and it goes right by because you feel no need to check it.
On the chair-throwing report from the Nevada Democratic Party Convention:
Ralston: There is no correction for that because I have not corrected any reporting because I believe my reporting to be accurate.
However, yes, the Bernie Sanders’ people are going crazy. They have been going crazy. There have been blog posts written about this, several of them. There are people who have said the most vicious things imaginable about it. I reported that chairs were thrown because eyewitnesses told me chairs were thrown. There are at least two people on the record saying there were chairs being thrown. I believe chairs were thrown. The Bernie Sanders’s people are upset because there is no video that can be found of chairs being thrown. So if it’s not on video, they say not only that it didn’t happen but that I’m lying and that I fabricated it, which is absolutely ludicrous.
From NPR's ombudsman: Fact-Checking NPR's Reports on Vegas 'Violence'
Jon Ralston, Reno Gazette-Journal columnist; host Ralston Live on Vegas PBS; Steve Sebelius, Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist, host, Politics NOW on KLAS-TV
