Yesterday, I looked at the voting records of all Democratic gubernatorial candidates. Ben Jealous has been registered to vote in Maryland only since 2012 and I speculated that either he had been voting elsewhere or not at all.
Turns out that Jealous was registered in DC from 2000 through 2014 – far longer than he has been registered in Maryland.
Recent Democrat
Jealous became a Democrat only recently. He was registered in DC as an unaffiliated voter:
This choice stands out because, as in Montgomery and Prince George’s Counties, the closed Democratic primary is the key election in most cases. His decision to register as an independent means that, for example, he could not vote in the 2008 presidential primary between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Jealous also did not have the opportunity to weigh in on heated contests for mayor and other local offices.
Lackadaisical Voter
For someone who is asking people to vote for him, Jealous missed a lot of elections. When he was registered in DC, Jealous skipped 10 of 18 elections in which he was eligible to vote. (Primaries in which the DC Board of Elections and Ethics says he was ineligible are excluded. There must have been nonpartisan offices or questions on the primary elections listed here.)
As reported yesterday, he also missed two of the six elections while registered in Maryland, so he has voted in exactly one-half of elections since 2000.
Missed Historic Votes
Among the 56% of elections that Jealous didn’t participate were some important contests. He didn’t vote in the historic election of Barack Obama as our first African-American president, probably unusual in a former NAACP President! He also did not vote in 2012, when he was reelected even more handily.
Jealous also missed out on the vote on to legalize marijuana in 2014.
At the local level, the 2013 special election to fill a Council vacancy, the DC equivalent of our state legislature, was an exciting contest and far from a foregone conclusion.
Finally, as mentioned yesterday, he has never voted in a Maryland gubernatorial primary. The first Democratic primary vote he casts for governor will be for himself.
via http://www.theseventhstate.com/?p=10190