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Coffee Break

Coffee Break: Safety first

Voters wear masks and maintain social distance Friday, Sept. 18, 2020 during early voting at the Ramsey County Elections Office in St. Paul.
Voters wear masks and maintain social distance Friday, Sept. 18, 2020 during early voting at the Ramsey County Elections Office in St. Paul.Christine T. Nguyen | MPR News/Christine T. Nguyen

by Jill Riley and Anna Weggel

October 14, 2020

Big thanks to Minnesota Secretary of State Steve Simon for joining Jill this morning to talk about how to vote and how to vote SAFELY in a pandemic.

In the conversation, Steve said: "Well, fortunately, we had a really good dress rehearsal of sorts with the August 11 primary, also a statewide election, and the strategy that we used there worked very, very successfully. And we're gonna do the same for Nov. 3, which is, we are purchasing and distributing to all 3,000 polling places in Minnesota, PPE and supplies. We will have high-grade, almost surgical grade masks for all of the poll workers and the election judges. We're gonna have regular-grade masks for voters themselves who show up without one. We're gonna have hand sanitizers and pumps and wipes, and we're gonna have rules in place that we worked on with the Department of Health that govern everything from the use of pens to social distancing to the automatic wipe down of the polling surfaces after the use by voters."

It's got us thinking about safety in general and how it's at the forefront of our minds right now.

So for today's 9:30 Coffee Break, what songs do you want to hear about safety, danger, being careful, staying away from harm, etc.?

Respond with your song ideas in the comments below.

Have an idea for a Coffee Break topic? Submit your idea for a future theme and browse past Coffee Breaks in our archive.

Songs played

Men Without Hats - The Safety Dance
Cake - Stickshifts And Safetybelts
Electric Six - Danger! High Voltage
Bob Dylan - Shelter From The Storm
The Primitives - Crash
Kanye West - Drive Slow feat. Paul Wall and GLC
Hot Chip - Careful