Massachusetts Beverage Business reports Cumberland Farms has abandoned its plans for a ballot question this fall that asks voters to let it install beer and wine coolers in all its stores because it's just too darned busy concentrating on protecting its workers and customers from Covid-19. Read more.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that voters this fall will get to decide whether to give all food stores the right to get a license to sell beer and wine, through a ballot question proposed by convenience-store giant Cumberland Farms, which has the maximum seven licenses allowed by current state law. Read more.
Boston elections officials told a City Council committee today that while voting by mail would be ideal in the age of pandemic, they're not currently set up to handle it - and that without proper planning it could mean having hundreds of volunteers counting ballots in close proximity at City Hall, which would defeat the whole point of trying to keep people away from each other. Read more.
Shiva Ayyadurai, who is making yet another bid for a Senate seat this year, is suing Robert F. Kennedy Jr., whose nephew is running for that same Senate seat.
At issue is who is the biggest, most libeling liar. Read more.
The Chelsea Record reports Chelsea City Councilor Damali Vidot has turned in papers to run against state Rep. Dan Ryan in the September Democratic primary for the 2nd Suffolk district, which covers Charlestown and most of Chelsea.
WBUR reports. You can guess the reason why.
Interesting fact for supporters of Orange Julius Caesar: The military has used vote by mail since the Civil War.
The Supreme Judicial Court ruled today that the Covid-19 crisis is making it too hard for many candidates to collect enough signatures to get on the ballot for the September primary and so ordered that candidates need only collect half as many signatures - and that candidates for state legislative races have more time to do so. Also, candidates can submit signatures gathered electronically rather than on paper. Read more.
Wearing blue gloves and a mask, former City Councilor Rob Consalvo today filed signatures to get on the September Democratic primary ballot to replace 14th Suffolk State Rep. Angelo Scaccia, who is not running for re-election. Read more.
Mike Freedberg takes a look at the precinct-by-precinct votes for Biden, Sanders and Warren.
He possibly, maybe, just might have gotten a little hyperbolic at the end, where he compares the battle between progressives and old-line Hyde Parkers in the Democratic ward-committee election in Ward 18 to the blockbusting and red lining that forced the Jews out of Mattapan and Dorchester in the 1960s and 1970s.
CNN reports. That leaves Bill Weld and Vermin Supreme as the only Massachusetts candidates still running for president.
WBUR reports Newton yesterday approved a ballot question allowing a developer to turn a 23-acre parcel in Newton Upper Falls into a mixed-use development with 800 apartments - 120 designated below market rate - and office and retail space.
Unofficial city returns show the slate of Trumpier-than-thous in Ward 20 (West Roxbury and a piece of Roslindale) have defeated the equally pro-Trump "moderate" slate that had controlled the Republican Ward Committee, 567-167, on a platform that included total Trump and ICE fealty, free paper bags at local supermarkets and a fight against bike lanes on Centre Street in West Roxbury (which the other slate also opposed). Read more.
WBZ interviews Secretary of State Bill Galvin, who says you can bring your own pen with which to vote tomorrow if you're worried about coronavirus (since nobody seems to care that there have been thousands more flu cases in the state so far). Just don't bring red - the scanners can't read that color.
An area Trump supporter who has spent the last few months standing on Boston-area street corners is now attracting ad-hoc counter-sign holders. Josh Bittker reports this morning: Read more.
June Bug reports that the flag-wavin' red-blood 'Murican who's been showing his support for the president on Revere Beach Parkway of late (on the right) was joined today - at a bit of a distance - by a guy who doesn't share his feelings, and who took advantage of the warmish weather to get some sun.
The Dorchester Reporter watched last night's debate between the incumbent senator and his challenger.
Massachusetts Beverage Business reports that a group representing the state's package stores is suing to block a proposed 2020 referendum that would let convenience-store chains, specifically Cumberland Farms, own as many liquor licenses as they want.
The plaintiffs, led by Sav-Mor Liquors Benjamin Weiner, said AG Maura Healey blew it by approving the measure, in part because it asks voters to do four separate things and the state constitution only allows ballot questions to ask voters to do just one thing at a time.
Deval Patrick might stage a Bloombergian late entry into the presidential race, which would bring the number of Massachusetts candidates back up to three - four if you include El Bloombito, who spent his formative years in Medford. Patrick is, of course, upset that none of the roughly 5,000 moderates in the race (remember Seth Moulton?) seem to have put wooden stakes in the Warren and Sanders campaigns yet.
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