7. No more tickets for panhandling
- In Montgomery, the police department will no longer be arresting or ticketing people for panhandling, which comes after a lawsuit settlement that involved the City, the American Civil Liberties Union of Alabama and the Southern Poverty Law Center.
- Per the settlement, there will no longer be arrests or tickets for panhandling for three years while courts decide if the laws that criminalize this behavior are constitutional.
6. Jury trials have been halted due to coronavirus
- As coronavirus cases rise across the state, Mobile and Madison counties have decided to halt jury trials until next year, which also happened earlier in 2020 when the state started shutting down due to the pandemic.
- The courts will still be operating, but they just won’t have some of the same in-person trials. Madison County will also halt some hearings for small claims, traffic and district courts.
5. Votes are being certified
- In both Pennsylvania and Nevada, the results of the General Election have been certified, with former Vice President Joe Biden winning both states, but there are still ongoing legal challenges in both states from President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign.
- Biden’s senior advisor Bob Bauer said, “Trump did everything he could to disenfranchise voters and stop the results from being certified in Pennsylvania,” adding that some of the legal challenges led to “one of the most embarrassing courtroom performances of all time… Trump did not succeed in Pennsylvania and he will not succeed anywhere else.”
4. Reports of 2020 Census issues in Alabama
- According to a new report from The Associated Press, Census workers in Alabama were instructed to falsify records if workers couldn’t get responses from households within the last month of the Census.
- There are text messages between a supervisor and a worker where the worker is told to record fake counts in Dothan. Workers were allegedly told to record the household to have one person if no other response could be obtained. The Census Bureau is investigating the allegations. The false records could lead to an undercount of Alabama residents and impact congressional seats, Electoral College votes and federal funding.
3. Historic day for Dow Jones
- The Dow Jones Industrial Average surpassed 30,000 for the first time in history, and during a news briefing President Donald Trump announced this and said he’s “thrilled with what’s happened on the vaccine front.”
- Trump went on to say that the advancements with a vaccine are “having a big effect.” He mentioned that this is the ninth time there’s been historic growth with the stock market during his presidency, while the national media is pretending this is about Biden’s cabinet picks — or as some of those in the media are referring to them, the “Avengers.”
2. Jones lobbying to work for Biden
- U.S. Senator Doug Jones (D-AL) appeared on MSNBC with Joy Reid where he discussed the election and ongoing challenges from President Donald Trump’s campaign, and Jones said that this effort by Trump is a “national embarrassment.”
- Jones said that what’s taken place are just “crazy conspiracy theories,” and added that he’s “not seeing anything where there was any legal basis whatsoever,” standing in agreement with former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie’s comments earlier this week. Jones also said it’s time to “let this transition move forward,” which was already happening as evidenced by the chyron that stated, “GSA TELLS BIDEN IT IS READY TO BEGIN TRANSITION.”
1. Straight-ticket voting dominates
- In Alabama, the number of people that went to their polling place or voted absentee who voted straight-ticket made up 67% of ballots counted in the 2020 election.
- Unsurprisingly, Republicans dominated this count with 62% of all straight-ticket ballots cast going to the GOP, according to the Alabama Secretary of State’s office.
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