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It didn't go entirely well in California.
Governor: the entirely evil, opportunistic, say-anything but serve the rich Gov. Schwarzenegger beat the nerdy, fairly honest, labor-sympathizing challenger Angelides by a big margin.
Insurance commissioner: the idiot dot-com right-wing Poizner ("shocked, shocked, that medical offices keep paper records") beat the labor-sympathising, fairly honest Cruz Bustamonte by a big margin.
Late negative ads and blatant big-media bias helped those guys a lot.
34 of 53 US House of Representative races went Democrat, but all of 2 of those were incumbents, and 5 of them had no Republican candidate (there was one district with no Democratic candidate). I know that at least two of those, the Republicans had to drop out of the race because they were indicted. Basically, where there was an incumbent, it stayed. One of the Republican wins was without a Democratic candidate.
Board of equalization (tax board): half and half. I don't know what it was before.
State Senate: 14 out of 20 races Democratic, again no incumbents lost. And again, two districts had no Republican candidate.
State Assembly: 49 out of 80 Democrats, again no incumbents lost, but there weren't that many incumbents, so I'll have to do more research to see where we were before. 5 races without a Republican candidate.
One of the State districts (Central Coast, but I forget which) had no Republican candidate because the Republican disappeared a month ago, with rumors that he had moved to another county.
The propositions were not an unmitigated disaster. It kind of looks like voters were going "yes, yes" until they hit the parental abuse proposition (the one that would require parents to be notified if their daughters came for an abortion, without regard to the girls' home situations), and then they just went "no, no" till the end.
1A Y Transp Fund Protect 1B Y Hwy/Air/Port Bond
1C Y Housing Shelter Fund 1D Y School Facility Bond
1E Y Disaster/Flood Bond 83 Y Sex Offender Reform
84 Y Water/Flood/Park 85 N Parental Notificat.
86 N Cigarette Tax 87 N Energy/Oil Tax
88 N Educ. Fund/Prop. Tax 89 N Campaign Public Fund
90 N Eminent Domain
It's a problematic vote in a few ways. 1A and 1B together amount to a permanent commitment to building highways at the expense of public transportation (though they could be interpreted in other ways, if we had a gutsy state government). 83 amounts to 1984 for deviants, and since deviance is defined in extemely broad manner, your 20 year old who comes on to a 17 year old is potentially prevented for life from living in walking distance to a school: so is the flasher. The position here is that nobody can overcome their problems, nobody who has ever done anything untoward can ever be trusted to not be a demon after that. See also the widespread use of the word "predator" to mean a person who looks at pornography or a person who says suggestive things to a 16 year old. 86-89 were all attempts to get some decent liberal politics rolling in the state (I myself voted against 89, because it read like there was a gotcha in it that would entrench the same-old same-old), and they all went down. 90 was an attempt to keep state and local governments from being able to have strong land use power, and it went down. Probably because Californians have seen how eminent domain has helped to keep the coast open and clean, and we have a lot invested in that.
Locally:
My man for COunty Superintendent of Schools, Michael Watkins, won. In Santa Cruz City Counsil elections my man Bruce Van Allen did very poorly, half the leading vote getter (Cynthia Matthews, about whom I do not care). I do care that the fairly evil Lynn Robinson won. Mike Rotkin, of course, won. In Watsonville, I don't know the races well, but I notice that in a town with I think 40% Hispanic voters (which means a much higher percentage of Hispanics overall), only one of the races was one by a Hispanic person. I also recognize one of the winners, Dale Skillicorn: he's the guy who proposed that poorest parts of Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, and possibly Santa Clara counties split off to form perhaps the poorest county on the coast (maybe Del Norte county would be poorer). In other words, he's an urbo-phobic idiot.
For local measures in the city of Santa Cruz:
G, to raise the minimum wage, went down by a high margin, based I think on the threats by a small number of businessmen that they would relocate if it passed.
Everything else passed handily: H, to raise the sales tax for the purpose of fixing the roads, cleaning the parks and river: I and J, to hold the University accountable for the demands its growth makes on city resources: and K, to direct the police to make marijuana law enforcement lowest priority.
So. The election was not a wash, but it was not an unmitigated victory either.
Oh, and in Ohio, my friend's sister-in-law, Mary Jo Kilroy, seems to have lost by a 2 point margin, which to me is small enough to ask for a recount . . . oh, but wait! it's Diebold country! They can't have a recount!
Me, I'm still kind of tired -- I was working the polls from 6 to 10. We had 191 paper ballots, 26 absentee ballots dropped in, and 3 touch screen ballots. We had one assisted vote and 31 wonky provisional ballots of which I guess maybe half or more will go through. That is, of the ballots cast at my precinct, 16% were wonky in some way.
But -- I HELPED CURTIS RELIFORD CAST HIS VOTE!
This guy is the real deal. He's the guy whose truck is plastered with exhortations to help the victims of Katrina -- still -- he takes regular trips down to Louisiana with his truck filled with stuff and money and he gives it to people. No bs, no head trips, no grandstanding. So he shows up at my precinct -- he's recently moved from mid-county to north county and he did re-register but he can't figure out how to vote. So I call to County, and because we do not live in Florida the answer is he lives in a mail-only district (because it's way out in the wilderness where there are bears and no public buildings for polling places) but all he has to do is to come into the county building and they will give him a ballot and he can vote. Ta-da!
We do not purge our voting rolls in Santa Cruz County (the election department slogan: Let the Voter Vote!). We put inactive voters on a list and they vote provisionally along with the people whose address is in doubt or have some other wonky thing going on (they can't reach their home precinct in time, they had an absentee ballot and they lost it, whatever). Provisional votes are put into a special pink envelope (the election department slogan: Think Pink!) which is all sealed up with the voter's information and the reason they're in the pink envelope written on the outside. Then somebody at the County goes through all these pink envelopes and figures out which ones are too wonky to count and which ones can be counted. Then the ballots of the votable ones are counted.
You know why we do this? Because of left-wing agitation throughout the seventies, that's why.
Governor: the entirely evil, opportunistic, say-anything but serve the rich Gov. Schwarzenegger beat the nerdy, fairly honest, labor-sympathizing challenger Angelides by a big margin.
Insurance commissioner: the idiot dot-com right-wing Poizner ("shocked, shocked, that medical offices keep paper records") beat the labor-sympathising, fairly honest Cruz Bustamonte by a big margin.
Late negative ads and blatant big-media bias helped those guys a lot.
34 of 53 US House of Representative races went Democrat, but all of 2 of those were incumbents, and 5 of them had no Republican candidate (there was one district with no Democratic candidate). I know that at least two of those, the Republicans had to drop out of the race because they were indicted. Basically, where there was an incumbent, it stayed. One of the Republican wins was without a Democratic candidate.
Board of equalization (tax board): half and half. I don't know what it was before.
State Senate: 14 out of 20 races Democratic, again no incumbents lost. And again, two districts had no Republican candidate.
State Assembly: 49 out of 80 Democrats, again no incumbents lost, but there weren't that many incumbents, so I'll have to do more research to see where we were before. 5 races without a Republican candidate.
One of the State districts (Central Coast, but I forget which) had no Republican candidate because the Republican disappeared a month ago, with rumors that he had moved to another county.
The propositions were not an unmitigated disaster. It kind of looks like voters were going "yes, yes" until they hit the parental abuse proposition (the one that would require parents to be notified if their daughters came for an abortion, without regard to the girls' home situations), and then they just went "no, no" till the end.
1A Y Transp Fund Protect 1B Y Hwy/Air/Port Bond
1C Y Housing Shelter Fund 1D Y School Facility Bond
1E Y Disaster/Flood Bond 83 Y Sex Offender Reform
84 Y Water/Flood/Park 85 N Parental Notificat.
86 N Cigarette Tax 87 N Energy/Oil Tax
88 N Educ. Fund/Prop. Tax 89 N Campaign Public Fund
90 N Eminent Domain
It's a problematic vote in a few ways. 1A and 1B together amount to a permanent commitment to building highways at the expense of public transportation (though they could be interpreted in other ways, if we had a gutsy state government). 83 amounts to 1984 for deviants, and since deviance is defined in extemely broad manner, your 20 year old who comes on to a 17 year old is potentially prevented for life from living in walking distance to a school: so is the flasher. The position here is that nobody can overcome their problems, nobody who has ever done anything untoward can ever be trusted to not be a demon after that. See also the widespread use of the word "predator" to mean a person who looks at pornography or a person who says suggestive things to a 16 year old. 86-89 were all attempts to get some decent liberal politics rolling in the state (I myself voted against 89, because it read like there was a gotcha in it that would entrench the same-old same-old), and they all went down. 90 was an attempt to keep state and local governments from being able to have strong land use power, and it went down. Probably because Californians have seen how eminent domain has helped to keep the coast open and clean, and we have a lot invested in that.
Locally:
My man for COunty Superintendent of Schools, Michael Watkins, won. In Santa Cruz City Counsil elections my man Bruce Van Allen did very poorly, half the leading vote getter (Cynthia Matthews, about whom I do not care). I do care that the fairly evil Lynn Robinson won. Mike Rotkin, of course, won. In Watsonville, I don't know the races well, but I notice that in a town with I think 40% Hispanic voters (which means a much higher percentage of Hispanics overall), only one of the races was one by a Hispanic person. I also recognize one of the winners, Dale Skillicorn: he's the guy who proposed that poorest parts of Santa Cruz, Monterey, San Benito, and possibly Santa Clara counties split off to form perhaps the poorest county on the coast (maybe Del Norte county would be poorer). In other words, he's an urbo-phobic idiot.
For local measures in the city of Santa Cruz:
G, to raise the minimum wage, went down by a high margin, based I think on the threats by a small number of businessmen that they would relocate if it passed.
Everything else passed handily: H, to raise the sales tax for the purpose of fixing the roads, cleaning the parks and river: I and J, to hold the University accountable for the demands its growth makes on city resources: and K, to direct the police to make marijuana law enforcement lowest priority.
So. The election was not a wash, but it was not an unmitigated victory either.
Oh, and in Ohio, my friend's sister-in-law, Mary Jo Kilroy, seems to have lost by a 2 point margin, which to me is small enough to ask for a recount . . . oh, but wait! it's Diebold country! They can't have a recount!
Me, I'm still kind of tired -- I was working the polls from 6 to 10. We had 191 paper ballots, 26 absentee ballots dropped in, and 3 touch screen ballots. We had one assisted vote and 31 wonky provisional ballots of which I guess maybe half or more will go through. That is, of the ballots cast at my precinct, 16% were wonky in some way.
But -- I HELPED CURTIS RELIFORD CAST HIS VOTE!
This guy is the real deal. He's the guy whose truck is plastered with exhortations to help the victims of Katrina -- still -- he takes regular trips down to Louisiana with his truck filled with stuff and money and he gives it to people. No bs, no head trips, no grandstanding. So he shows up at my precinct -- he's recently moved from mid-county to north county and he did re-register but he can't figure out how to vote. So I call to County, and because we do not live in Florida the answer is he lives in a mail-only district (because it's way out in the wilderness where there are bears and no public buildings for polling places) but all he has to do is to come into the county building and they will give him a ballot and he can vote. Ta-da!
We do not purge our voting rolls in Santa Cruz County (the election department slogan: Let the Voter Vote!). We put inactive voters on a list and they vote provisionally along with the people whose address is in doubt or have some other wonky thing going on (they can't reach their home precinct in time, they had an absentee ballot and they lost it, whatever). Provisional votes are put into a special pink envelope (the election department slogan: Think Pink!) which is all sealed up with the voter's information and the reason they're in the pink envelope written on the outside. Then somebody at the County goes through all these pink envelopes and figures out which ones are too wonky to count and which ones can be counted. Then the ballots of the votable ones are counted.
You know why we do this? Because of left-wing agitation throughout the seventies, that's why.
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