Barack Obama – 17 votes
John McCain – 10 votes
Ron Paul – 2 votes
(via Balloon Juice)
Go Ron Paul! :-)
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The next thing on the ballot is President/Vice President. And then I still have 23 more items on the ballot. But I think I need to catch a few Z’s. I’ll try not to be gone too long, I know all my readers are anxiously waiting for my vote for Washington State Superior Court Judge Postition No. 22 and such. I am running out of time of course, and should probably just keep powering through, but I think I need to stop to be horizontal for just a little bit. :-) Full text is here. This makes the King County Executive, King County Assessor and the King County Council into non-partisan offices. I frankly think ALL elected offices should be non-partisan. Parties are generally a bad thing. I’d rather candidates stand on their own views and merits rather than tying themselves to some larger group. The opposition to this points out that candidates will still have such associations, it just won’t be on the ballot. Sure, but the information will still be easily available for those who want it, and this may just encourage people to think about the candidates themselves rather than just voting blindly for the party they generally prefer. This is a good thing. My vote: YES Full text is here. Basically, this makes it a bit harder to get County Level Initatives on the ballot and changes it from the nonsensical two step process where first you vote if you want it on the ballot, then if that passes it appears on the next ballot… and makes it just go straight on the general election ballot if it gets enough signatures… with a higher number of signatures required. I fundamentally think that ballot initiatives are generally not the right way to do things. And if they are possible at all, it should take a pretty high bar to get on the ballot, and that sort of initiative should be a very rare thing. Maybe one or two a decade. So this effort to make it a little bit harder to do is fine with me. My vote: YES Full text here. You have got to be kidding me. This changes budget deadlines to be 20 days earlier. This kind of stuff should REALLY not need a ballot measure to approve. Sigh. Crazy. Having said that, I have no objections, so… My vote is: YES
Another change from a new poll, this time from me reviewing each of pollster.com’s state charts one by one, which I usually do daily, but I’m doing every 6 hours today. I’m not sure about this one though, as I’ve found no other reference to this poll yet, and it looks like an extreme outlier, but would fit in EXACTLY with the trend if you reversed Obama and McCain’s numbers. So I suspect this may actually be a typo on Pollster which will be corrected later. If so, I will undo this change if/when I see evidence of the other result. But in case this is real, it causes Obama’s lead in Michigan to dip under 10%, moving the state from Strong Obama to Weak Obama. New Summary: McCain SuperBest: McCain 317, Obama 221 Current “everybody gets their leans”: Obama 349, McCain 189 Obama Best Case: Obama 406, McCain 132 Full text here. This would establish an office responsible for producing economic forecasts and analysis which would be used to guide budget decisions. I repeat my statement about how the fact that a ballot measure is needed to approve this sort of thing is crazy. But this seems reasonable. My vote: YES Full text is here. This would allow the County Council to establish additional qualifications for certain elected positions. (For instance, requiring that a Sheriff have law enforcement experience.) I fundamentally think that any position that really and truly requires very specific qualifications should be an appointed position, not an elected position. If however a position is made an election position, regardless of the job description, then the voters should have full and total authority to vote in whoever they want. (I’d even disagree with age and citizenship requirements and such… if it is an elected position, let the voters decide… let them vote for a ripe watermelon if they really want to for that matter.) Voters may sometimes be stupid, but the nature of a democracy is that if the voters want something, they get it… and often it is exactly what they deserve when they make a stupid choice. But the whole point is that it is the choice of the electorate. And MOST of the time, they make decent decisions. This change is unnecessary and stupid. And it is only even being considered because there are elected positions that should not be elected positions in the first place. My vote: NO Full text is here. This is about changing the makeup and authority of various county committees. Honestly, I couldn’t care one way or another, and it seems to me that something is very broken in how county government is organized if you need a ballot item to change minor things like this. Anyway, this seems harmless, and the local government folks seem to want it, so… My vote is: YES Obama 15 votes, McCain 6 votes. Dixville Notch has not voted Democratic in a presidential race since 1968. A sign of things to come? |
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