Voting

It's been a while since our last post, but we wanted to share how different voting in California is. Since we have lots of propositions to vote on (direct democracy overload), both the state and the city send us information booklets. The booklets contain information about the candidates running for office and their statements; that's pretty straightforward. However, the interesting part is the text around the propositions. Here is a picture of the booklet. We each got our own in the mail.




The booklets list the text of the propositions, then they have a description written by a neutral committee explaining what it does. The state comptroller chimes in with a statement on how much the proposition could potentially cost. After that, there's a section where both a group supporting the measure and a group opposing the measure get some space to tell you how to vote on the proposition. Then both groups get to rebut each other's statement. And then there's a section for other groups, outside of the two that have already commented, to submit paid comments. And finally, in the back of the booklet, it shows what the changes to the state or city code would actually be.

Does it sound like a lot? Well, it is! Allison was smart enough to request a mail-in ballot, so we spent time going through the booklets, reading the ballot, and making our choices. We spent a lot of time doing this. We spent the better part of three evenings at home trying to do our research and make informed decisions. The first evening, we would read all of the candidate bios and positions independently, and then discuss their merits after we both did the research. By the third night of this, we were splitting up the propositions. "Ok, you look at 6, I'll look at 7." We probably spent over six hours deciding how to vote. This second image is of the actual paper ballot. In order to vote, you connect the two parts of the arrow to complete the arrow. This image shows the ballot for city and county propositions. A-J were on the front...the back had up to V.

We dropped Allison's mail-in ballot off at our polling place (the garage of one of the houses on our block) on Election Day. I had to stand in line for about 45 minutes in the morning to get my ballot. Once I did, it took me a good 15 minutes to transfer my votes from my cheat sheet to the actual 7-page ballot and double check it. Then I fed the paper ballot into the machine and collected my "I voted" sticker. Here are Allison's 4 paper ballots and booklets.