Tuesday, Nov 3: Election Day

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It's not like Christmas, but it is like Christmas in the sense that, you know, the buildup, the anticipation, the kind of the, what's the word I'm looking for? Potentiality of what could happen excites you. And then you get the post-election crash, like you kind of get the post-Christmas crash. The post-Christmas crash usually happens after dinner, right? Like by Christmas night, you're like, I just want to go to bed. Kids woke me up way too early. Just been doing too much. We'll feel that way probably tomorrow. But tonight we'll be eagerly anticipating results. And who knows how quickly we'll get results for many of these races. But we can talk about it all day, today, at 508-996-0500. The polls open in a little bit more than 45 minutes. We'll encourage you, as always, to call in after you've voted. Let us know where you vote and what number you were and what it looked like out of the polls while you were there. Just a reminder, though, if you are a candidate, please don't call in. Please don't call in today because we don't have the opportunity to offer equal time to your opponents. Generally, those kind of things are coordinated. Nobody really had the time to sit there and coordinate that today. But that's usually like somebody says they're going to call in and okay, well, now we've got to call your opponent and say, hey, they're calling in because otherwise there's a whole process involved in equal time. But it's just easier if you just don't call in. If you haven't made your case to voters by now, it's too late. Calling into the radio station today isn't going to make a difference. And inevitably that happens. You know, there's candidates that we've reached out to throughout election season. Hey, you want to come on? Nobody gets back to you. Then the day of, they're like, hey, can I call in? I'm like, no, where have you been? I never got the message you were trying to call. Sure. So anyway, 508-996-0500, app chat and open line voicemails on the WBSM app. I heard a question somebody called in to Chris's show yesterday and asked. And I don't know if he got back into it because I think it was kind of end of the hour it might've been. I had a lot going on, so I wasn't really paying full attention. But someone had brought up the point On the ballot. All of the incumbents are listed as incumbents except for the governor. And I actually knew the answer to that question only because I had wondered the same thing myself a couple of weeks ago. So when I was working on the Sean Oliver stories, when all of that news came out, at one point I needed a shot of a sample ballot. Oh, it was when I was writing about how you couldn't vote for another lieutenant governor candidate if you were voting for Mike Minogue. And so I needed a screenshot. The ballot, and I found a sample ballot, and I said, huh, how come it doesn't say incumbent on this? So I thought maybe it was like, you know, it wasn't an official ballot or something. And so I started like digging into that a little bit, and I found out the reason why it does not say incumbent for the governor on the Massachusetts ballot. It has to, and it also doesn't say their first name for the candidates, and like other offices, it does not list their addresses. And that is because the. Rest of the ballot where it lists all that information is governed by a law that was passed well before 1966. The gubernatorial race on the ballot is governed by a law that was passed in 1966. That is when they started, instead of having the lieutenant governor and the governor separate in the general election, that's when they started running together as a ticket. And when they did that, they put them together on the ballot. They eliminated first names. They eliminated addresses and they eliminated the word incumbent. I'm assuming for the sake of space. But that is why and that is when it changed. And I'm sure we'll get the phone calls from people like, I remember when I voted 10 years ago, it said it on there. Like, no, no, it didn't. So just keep that in mind. That's why. And also, I think that's probably the one race on the ballot where you can get Not having to list the incumbent. I think that's probably the one race here in Massachusetts that most people would be able to name who the incumbent is. You might not know who your incumbent county commissioner is. You might not know who your incumbent planning board members are, but I think it's different when it's the governor. So I think you can kind of get away with that. But that is the only reason why, is it was just that is governed by a different law from when they made that change to having them run as a ticket. And I will put out a reminder. Just in case you hadn't heard this information by now. But when you do go out to vote today, if you do want to vote for Mike Minogue, you have to vote for Mike Minogue and Sean Oliver. You cannot cross out Sean Oliver's name. You cannot write in a lieutenant governor candidate. You cannot write in Mike Minogue and a lieutenant governor candidate. All of those things will then invalidate your vote. It's considered a stray mark on the ballot. So you can't cross out a name that's a stray mark. You can't circle Mike Minogue's name, you know, fill out the oval for Minogue Oliver and then write in a lieutenant governor. There would be two votes that would strike out your vote. And you can't skip over circling, filling out the oval next to Mike Minogue's name and putting him and a lieutenant governor candidate as a write-in because you cannot write in a candidate that's already on the ballot, on the printed ballot. That will invalidate your vote. The only thing you can do if you want Mike Minogue to be the governor is vote for Mike Minogue and Sean Oliver. There will be no lieutenant governor. If you vote for Mike Minogue, according to Mike Minogue. So far, Sean Oliver is not giving us any indication. And by us, I mean here at WBSM or anybody has not given anybody any indication that he does not intend to resign as he told Mike Minogue that he would. So if that's the case, if that's the plan, that he would definitely still do that, then that means if you vote for Mike Minogue, there will not be a lieutenant governor. I don't think that that matters much to you if you're voting. I can't imagine. Not having a lieutenant governor is a reason why somebody would not vote for a candidate, but maybe. Maybe it makes you a little leery, but that does not mean that there's no plan of succession. If something happens to the governor, there is a line of succession. The secretary of state would be the next person in line. And by the way, it's not like it has to be something catastrophic that happens to Mike Minogue if he wins for this to happen. It's like, you know, when he goes out of state, when he travels out of state, the secretary of state becomes the acting governor. And in fact, an interesting little tidbit. If something does happen to the governor and somebody steps in to that role, even on a permanent basis, they're not considered the governor. They're the acting governor. 508-996-0500. Good morning. You're on WBSN. Good morning, Tim. I don't want to say my name so people won't get all upset. How you doing? Okay. I'm glad you did what you did yesterday, okay, by trying to find out what's going on. Yeah, I didn't, I couldn't believe that I didn't remember that I'd actually filled out that form and not put two and two together and realize like, hey, wait a minute, they are sending it out. So let me just give you a little update on that. I reached out to, well, I, you know, you have to go through the mayor's office to speak to the elections office. But I sent an email to the mayor's office and to Manny DeBrito saying, hey, I received this and filled it out. Does that mean that you are going forward with this? A street list requirement and the response I got back from the mayor's office was a link to that video in which they were talking about the money needed for it. But he said he is going to be getting me a longer response slash explanation. So that's that's what we have so far. But because my question to them was, does this mean that you are putting out these mailings and then going forward with collecting that data and moving forward from there? So I don't just. Just listening to that meeting again and a little bit more intently on what they were doing. These mailings were a bulk of the cost associated with it. So my assumption then is, yeah, if they're doing this, then, yeah, they're going forward with it. Yeah, I'm going to run something by you, okay? Everybody's talking about it, and I brought it up when I brought it up the first time. I was pronouncing that wrong. I was bringing it across a little when I was really excited, okay? And it's the listings, I think. But did you ever think that the city council has a lawyer, which is Dave Gerakoski? Mm-hm. Okay? And the city has a lawyer that takes, okay? And they're both excellent lawyers, okay? You're trying to tell me they don't know the difference? I'm only gonna make this a speculation because I don't wanna blame either one of them. How everybody turned on Brittle and saying he's got to do this and he's got to do this. Anybody ever think? That those two lawyers that I just mentioned, they told that Jakes called the mayor and the mayor ignored him because he does what he wants anyways and told him to be quiet. I'm only speculating now like everybody else does. And so Dave Gerakoski works for the city council. Those two are the smartest two people in that room every time they're there. Don't you think they know the law? Could have been that Gerakoski did the same thing, all of the city council, but they didn't want it because that's the only thing that Gerakoski is to give the information to the city council. And they took it on their own not to bring it forward. So why should Bernardo do? He did what he did. He went to the thing, and you remember those words, catch as if you can. You remember those words? Yeah, so that was the city council's position, and Linda Morad pretty much said the same thing before Sean Oliver did, that they didn't want to spend $80,000 to send out these mailings. That's right. So whose fault is it, really? Is it Britta's, or is it? Well, again, I go back to Council President Pereira's comments here. The council's position was that that office had that money in the budget to be able to do that. That's what Council President Pereira said on here. They should have been able to fund that within the course of their office and not have it be an additional expense. Well, if he said that, then why didn't they do it? I'm just bringing it up because the way the city's been running. Everybody in New Bedford is getting shafted on this. Okay, that's all I want. Because you know, they got the lawyers there. They know better than anybody there, but nobody took it on their own to go to Boston, two lawyers, and do the job. But they expected Brenner to do it. So stop picking on Brittle. Brittle's doing his job. He's a voter for... So nobody was picking on him. We're just saying that it is the purview of his office to get it done. If the city council's not giving him the money to do it, he can't go to the secretary of state's office and say, well, what do you expect me to do? The city council won't give me the money. The secretary of state's office is going to say, I don't care. Why do we care about whether or not they give you the money? It's still your job to get it done. Right, but the bottom line is... You know that he's only a department head, like every other department head here. They have to answer to the mayor first, and the mayor might be telling him, leave it alone. How do we know that? But I just prove to you that they have to do it every year, and they haven't been doing it every year. Every time, good time, everybody voting, and vote your heart, not the people that you think. Vote your heart. Thank you. All right. Have a good day. All right. We got to take a break here. 508-996-0500. We'll take a break, come back with the news, and we can talk with you on the other side. Starting your day the right way with the Tim Weisberg Show. Mornings on WBSM. The Learjet victims in Florida have been identified. President Trump reopens the reflecting pool and the Rockefeller Plaza tree almost on its way to New York City. From the Cottage Street Motors WBSM Newsroom, this is WBSM News. Eight of the nine people killed on board the Learjet that crashed in Florida over the weekend are being identified. They include Texas multimillionaire tech entrepreneur Adam Robinson, his wife Helen Sharp, their two young toddler children, the couple's two friends, and a nanny, the father of... 20-year-old pilot Natalia Gedela confirmed she was also on board, and TMZ reports the pilot was 55-year-old Jeff Gregory. The plane departed from Austin and was going to the Bahamas, and the NTSB is investigating the crash. The Supreme Court has denied the Trump administration's appeal in California's mail-in ballot case. The Justice Department went to the high court yesterday asking it to overturn a lower court ruling that allowed the counting of mail-in votes to proceed. At issue were 20,000 ballots the feds say may have been cast by non-U.S. citizens. The Supreme Court did not explain its President Trump says the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool is once again open. He gave remarks in front of the landmark yesterday afternoon. The pool has been in the spotlight numerous times during Trump's second term. It underwent a renovation ahead of the country's 250th anniversary, only for it to be closed again shortly after. Trump claimed vandals badly damaged it, but later, a case against the man accused of tearing up the pool's surface was dropped. An official report later blamed the issues on poor workmanship. Dozens of robots competed in a race to climb Mount Tai, one of China's most famous peaks. The competitors carried eggs and watermelons for over 2.4 miles in a race that was billed as a test of real-world machine endurance. Organizers say the natural extreme testing ground could help train robots for real-world use. Winners received cash prizes in several categories, including the fastest robots and the best load-carrying four-legged machine. I'm at Mattinson. Almost home for the holidays, New York's most famous Christmas tree arrives this weekend. A Norway spruce from Otsego County in upstate New York will soon be on its way to its new home at Rockefeller Center. The tree will be cut down on Thursday, put on a truck, and will arrive in Manhattan two days later. Then it's going to spend a few weeks getting a big Apple makeover festooned with tens of thousands of lights and, of course, that iconic Swarovski crystal star. The tree will be the center of attention when NBC rings in the holiday season with its annual Christmas in Rockefeller Center show, December 2nd. In New York, I'm Daria Albinger. Amazon is launching a $25 Thanksgiving meal deal. The offer includes an 8-pound butterball turkey, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry sauce, vegetables, rolls, and ingredients for pumpkin pie. The deal runs through November 26th while supplies last in more than 2,300 U.S. cities and towns with Amazon's same-day grocery delivery. A new study shows energy drinks are connected to an increased risk for heart issues in young adults. The American Heart Association says caffeinated energy drinks and stimulant supplements were linked to serious heart conditions much more often than other products. That includes a higher reporting of cardiac arrest and heart attack for those ages 18 to 34. The association looked at 28,000 health cases over the recent eight-year period. To draw the conclusion, caffeinated energy drinks have become more popular, with sales doubling in the last 10 years. Once Upon a Farm is recalling all flavors of its tractor wheels, organic soft-baked baby food bars, due to a potential choking hazard. The FDA says the product forms a dry, sticky mass when chewed that becomes difficult to dislodge during back blows and the Heimlich maneuver. The Organic Baby Food Company says they will... reformulate the product and are working with the FDA to notify families and make sure affected products are removed from stores. A full list of states and territories impacted by the recall can be found on the Once Upon a Farm recall page. I'm Chris Coraggio. WBSM Sports. Bruins with a 3-2 shootout win over Vegas. Bees head to Pittsburgh on Thursday night. And the Celtics lose to the Rockets 109-93. The Seas host the Bucs tomorrow at 7.30. And now, your WPRI 12 forecast. Brought to you by Family Heating and Cooling in Westport. We'll have partly to mostly sunny skies around the south coast today. It'll be quite warm with high temperatures around 71 inland. 60s at the coastline. Clearing tonight, late night lows getting down to about 53. Sunny, dry and warm again tomorrow with highs right around 72. For WBSM, I'm 12 News Meteorologist T.J. DelSanto. I'm Mike Roberts. WBSM News, stay up to date with New Bedford's news talk station, WBSM, and get breaking news alerts and all of our content on the WBSM app. This WBSM News Update is brought to you by Stevie's Wine and Spirits. Look for the purple dot to try before you buy. Only at Stevie's Wine and Spirits in Fairhaven. Welcome back, 508-996-0500. app chat and open line voicemails on the WBSM app and got an app chat message from Participation Trophy Wife who said that no matter who wins, at least tomorrow, the political commercials will be gone. I mean, I don't know the Robert McConnell song is starting to get into my head. That's an earworm for sure. The first time I heard it, I was like, I don't know about this. Because when I first heard it, I was like, this sounds like a Masters of Tourism ad. More than a political ad. But then the more I heard it, the more it grew on me. So I'll be sad to just hear that jingle go. It's not often you get a full-on production for a local candidate. But yes, the commercials will end after today. You'll hear a bunch of them today, though, because candidates love to have their ads run on election day. So you'll hear a bunch of them today. But then tomorrow you won't have to worry about it anymore. At least until the next election cycle. So 508-996-0500, and I got an update yesterday from the city regarding the body camera footage from the Sean Oliver arrest. I had requested that footage, as I'm sure every media outlet around did, and got the response that the footage is being withheld as it is part of an ongoing investigation. Of course, we can appeal that decision. And we will to a point. I know that, you know, in the past, the New Bedford light has pushed back on some of these public records requests that don't get fulfilled. And then when the city does fulfill them, they want to charge money. And so the light is pushed back. And that's been a whole ongoing thing between the light and the city in recent years. And I just feel like by the time all that process gets worked out, they're going to release the footage. They're going to release it. They're just not going to release it yet until they've wrapped up all of this. So I don't know how much it's worth pushing back and, you know, just waiting and we'll get it when we get the report, the full report on their investigation into it. They're probably interviewing the police officers. They're probably interviewing the, and you got to think this is also going to be, it's not a single jurisdiction because reportedly where Sean Oliver had the two alcoholic beverages that he said that he had was that The Black Bass Grill in Dartmouth, so that's a different police department that will be working on that part of the investigation and then working together with New Bedford. So there's a lot of steps involved, a lot of things involved. Although the last time that this occurred with the Ward 3 counselor, Hugh Dunn, the district attorney's office was looking into it because of the lack of charges that were coming out of New Bedford. So we haven't heard anything about the DA's office looking into this at all. I think that means, I guess you can speculate that that means that this investigation is ongoing and that they haven't, they're telling, the reason they're giving us for not releasing this is true, that the investigation is ongoing. Not that I have any reason to doubt it, but I'm imagining some of you out there would be like, well, of course, that's what they're going to say, that there's an ongoing investigation. But the fact that the DA's office hasn't stepped in and said something about this and looked into this means that it probably is ongoing. So 508-996-0500, and I know here, we had that call yesterday, I know here the perception is probably that the Sean Oliver situation casts a pall on the Minogue campaign. There are people that are probably worried about that, and I would just say, and this is no offense to Sean Oliver, but people in other parts of the state are saying, who? Because that was weeks ago at this point, and while it is still big news here. I don't think it's impacting people's decision when they're going out to vote today. And I don't think, you might have a few people that are concerned. I don't like the idea of voting for a one-person ticket. I don't like the idea that there isn't a lieutenant governor to be the counterbalance to the governor and offer another perspective. I don't think that that's really what the role would have been for any lieutenant governor, for Mike Minogue. He seems to be a buck stops with me kind of guy. And a lot of that, I'm sure, comes from his business background. Where he has to be the decision maker, and the results of those decisions, good or bad, he takes responsibility for. So I think he looks at it as he would be the same type of governor. Whereas if you look at Maura Healey and Kim Driscoll, it's clear that they have a partnership in this. It's clear that Maura Healey appreciates whatever Kim Driscoll can offer, especially being someone who ran a large city, whereas Healey didn't have that type of municipal government experience. So I think that there's... It all depends, I guess, on the personalities of the people involved and their management style, for lack of a better term. So I think whoever, whether it had been Mike Minogue's preferred running mate, whether it had been Sean Oliver, whether it had been anybody, I don't think that that person was so consequential in what a Minogue administration would look like. So if that is a concern, if you were concerned about not having a lieutenant governor, if you vote for him, I wouldn't think that that's anything you need to be concerned about. Well, and like I said earlier, there's a succession plan anyway. And honestly, for the last four years, there's been many times when even when your governor wasn't in the state, neither was your lieutenant governor. So you're already falling down to the secretary of state. In fact, there was that one time when everybody was out of state and the auditor, Diana DiZaglio, was the acting governor. So that meant no governor, no lieutenant governor, no secretary of state, no attorney general, no treasurer. Five other people were all out of state or unavailable. So now when you head out to the polls in about 15 minutes, it'll be interesting to see what the turnout is today. Now, we do have to have the caveat because of the conversation we just had with Gilly and that we've been having with him that the street list. And by the way, I don't fault anybody for referring to it as a census. It gets a little confusing. And it did even in the city council meeting when they were talking about it, because it comes to you like a census. I think it even said census on it. I should have brought it in. I still have it on my desk. I so. So I did it. So the one that I got, I had to open it up. And when I opened it up, there was a QR code to scan. And then I answered all the questions on my phone. So it was not mailing back a paper. And I think that that is a hugely helpful thing in having to pay for this. Because otherwise, that would have been postage returned that the city would have been paying for. So I filled it all out, put in all the information. It took, took a... Good amount of time. Probably took me about 10 minutes to fill everything out. But I should have brought it in so I could have had it in front of me. But the idea that these lists haven't been updated in the most precise way. And I watched that video from that meeting back in June of 2025 or 4 when they talked about needing the funding for this. I watched that video where Mandy DiBretto talked about the steps that they take to try to keep those voter rolls as accurate as they can. You know, when somebody dies, they try to remove them. When somebody moves to another place and registers to vote there, they make sure they remove them here. But there's a lot of things that happen that aren't the city elections office fault when it comes to voter registration. I know I was a victim of that. I went to go vote in, I think it was the 2024 primary. Yeah, because I got a new license in, must have been January of 2024. And I went to go vote in the primary. They didn't have my name on the list in New Bedford, even though I'd already been voting in New Bedford for a couple of years. So I had to drive to Wareham where I was registered to vote to cast my ballot in the primary. And I said to the people, I said, is this any kind of fraud if I vote here because I don't live here? And they said, well, you're registered here. So as long as you only vote here, it's okay. And they explained to me, many people, they might live in, let's just say they live in But they vote in Wareham because they have property in Wareham that they own and that they care more about what goes on in Wareham because that's where their investment is. They said that does happen. So it's not out of the realm of possibility that, you know, you could live somewhere else and vote here. If you're only registered here, that's OK. And they said, if you're really concerned about it, just don't vote in any of the county races because you don't live in Plymouth County. You live in Bristol County and don't vote in anything that wouldn't be your district kind of thing. It was a presidential primary. So that's what I was voting for. But that was because when I went to the registry to renew my license that January, even though I had filled out the paperwork saying I did not want to register to vote, they still registered me. And they didn't put in my license address change, which I had filled out because my license still said Wareham on it. So I wanted my new one to say New Bedford on it. You know, I had this sticker on the back, but I wanted it to be on the front of the license. So I had put in the new address, but yet they still registered me at the previous address that was actually no longer my active address with the registry. And the whole thing got really screwy because somehow the registry ended up with my mailing address, which is Fairhaven, because I use a box over here at the UPS store. So I was getting Fairhaven excise taxes. Like, no, no, this is all screwed up. This is all wrong. Why is this so wrong with information I never put? I never even put my mailing address on that form. So I had to go and take care of this and go back to New Bedford and re-register in New Bedford. And that was not something that was New Bedford election office's fault. They didn't take me off the voter rolls. They were alerted that my registration had changed to Wareham, so they took me off the New Bedford roll. So that shows that they are proactive in doing so. So long story short here, while the voter turnout numbers will probably not be what we want them to be, At least it's not as bad as it could be if they weren't doing some of that work to mitigate the difference between the registered voters and the actual voters. And as Manny DiBerdo has said, look at the number of votes, not the percentage, until they can get all of this kind of straightened out, which it seems like they're doing that street list, so maybe they will. All right, I'm going to get a break in here. 508-996-0500. We'll be back in a few moments. Wake up weekday mornings with the Tim Weisberg Show, 1420 AM and 99.5 FM, WBSM. So we're getting a little bit of a respite here from November weather because it seems like it's been pretty warm. It was 54 degrees when I left the house this morning. That's not bad. In fact, my downstairs neighbor left the door open to the hallway, and for once I wasn't ready to yell at him in the morning. Be like, hey, close that door. You know how cold it gets because of that? It wasn't that bad at all. Soon enough, you're going to have the heat on all the time. And if your home heating is not as efficient as it could be and you need an upgrade, well, now's the time to do it because your home heating upgrade could cost you nothing. If you are a non-gas customer, if that means you use oil, propane, or electric, you may qualify for a free mini-split through MassSave. If you're a gas customer, you could get up to $16,000 off a heat pump. But these rebates are only guaranteed through this year. And C2S Energy is your local expert on dealing with MassSave and, of course, in installing a heat pump or a mini split. But what I love about it is that you don't have to worry about chasing down that rebate, especially this time of year. You don't want to be tying up hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands of dollars in these rebates and waiting for MassSave to get it back to you at a time when they're probably getting inundated with requests for that. So who knows how long the processing time could be. But that's why C2S Energy has your back. They're just going to cut that money right out of your bill. They are going to apply that rebate to your bill, and then they'll chase it down from MassSave. They'll be the ones to get paid from the program. You just save right at the beginning. So if you'd like to find out more, get a free estimate, then call C2S Energy, 774-961-6810, 774-961-6810, or visit c2senergy.com. Going to get one more break in here before the end of the hour. We'll be right back. And it is one minute now until the polls open. So get ready. There's probably some of you that are lined up outside waiting for the door to open. Yeah, some folks like to think of voting as like trying to get concert tickets from Ticketmaster back in like 1993. You're lined up outside.