Unless you are a candied yam...

I voted! It cost $18.30 to express mail my ballot to LA, but I did it. Why did I need to express mail it, you may ask? Because the ballot, which reminded me in bold letters to mail it back by the Friday before Election Day, arrived at my apartment on the Saturday before Election Day.

The attentive student will have noticed that Saturday comes after Friday.

Anyway, onto my own votes:

On the candidates, I ended up voting a straight Democratic ticket, with mixed feelings: yay Henry Waxman; meh Gavin Newsom.

On the judges, I voted yes for every single one. Not, however, without looking up each and every one on Google, where I discovered ScamJudges.com, a website devoted to decrying the incompetence of, among others, Judge Steven Suzukawa. Why? Because someone who lost a case in front of Judges Manella, Suzukawa, and Willhite knows how to make a website. Or rather, knows how to make a vintage 1995 website with elegant clipart that just has to be feces donuts. Check it out.

On the judges in actual elections, I did my usual who-endorsed-whom game, and voted for Mark Ameli and Alan Schneider. Also, Tom Torlakson for Superintendent of Public Instruction, and John Noguez for County Assessor.

Then came the propositions:

Again, I voted what appears to be a straight Democratic ticket, considering the three identical emails I received this weekend from John Burton of the California Democratic Party. That is, No on 20, 22, 23, and 26, and Yes on 21, 24, 25, and 27. In words instead of numbers, that's against constitutional amendments for establishing redistricting commissions and prohibiting state borrowing, suspension of air pollution control laws, and expanding the disastrous Prop 13 of 1978. It's also in favor of $18 annual vehicle license surcharges to fund state parks, repealing tax breaks for businesses, scrapping the 2/3 majority requirements of the aforementioned Prop 13, and getting rid of the redistricting commission.

Again, the attentive student of California politics will notice a problem: a proposition is missing. That would be Proposition 19, the legalization, regulation, and taxation of marijuana proposition. The Dems took no official position, as far as I can tell from Mr. Burton's emails which conspicuously leave that one out. I voted Yes on Prop 19, for many reasons. One is this, the study published yesterday that found that alcohol is the most harmful drug in use in the UK. Another is this opinion piece, one of many that details the way marijuana prosecutions overwhelmingly focus on young men of color. Then there's the fact that California is entirely broke, and any other revenue source helps. And other things, which I won't get into here. Suffice it to say that I believe the ballot initiative process is flawed, as is every political process, but I will make use of it to achieve ends I find desirable, rather than sit out the process in the hopes of those ends arriving by other means.


To make a long story short: vote, damnit!