Voting 5 November 2019

[polly_mer]

We have a couple local elections today and some bond issues.  Polls open at 7 AM.

Who else is voting today on things that are important locally, but may suffer from the claim that odd year first Tuesday after the first Monday aren't actually election days in the US?

[nebo113]

My state has off year elections for many positions, including local sheriff, etc., so I think turnout will be pretty good.

[downer]

I'm voting for township officials. Nothing very important at issue, although property taxes are always on people's minds since they are among the highest in the country. I'll probably vote a straight Democratic ticket, mainly because that's my offical affiliation and I don't have any other info to go on. These days it seems pretty hard to get info on local candidates, and in local politics, personal competency can make more difference than political stances. It is striking to me that I've seen nothing on my social media about local candidates. I don't normally vote in these elections, but these days there is more motivation to vote against anyone ready to identify as a Republican.

[aside]

Some contentious bond issues here, so I suspect turnout will be better than usual for an off year.  Money talks.

[polly_mer]

These days it seems pretty hard to get info on local candidates, and in local politics, personal competency can make more difference than political stances.

Our local chapter of League of Women Voters spends a good month hosting forums so that each race gets a fair shake in the public eye.

We still have two local newspapers that then devote a good page to each forum as well as running pages of letters to the editor stumping for each candidate.  Each local newspaper has a couple days per month where the newspaper is delivered free to each household in the county, even though one can subscribe and get either newspaper every day.  The online versions of both papers tend to have free access to the public notice articles like the LWV forums.

Saturdays for the past three months have been filled with candidates walking door-to-door to talk with individuals to make a case for an important local issue.

We're still small-town America where it's hard to ignore the local issues that affect us all and we need people who will make some sort of decision and take all the heat for doing so.  On the plus side, many of our races have only good candidates.  On the minus side, we have a couple races that have zero good candidates, so we're all hoping that the rest of the relevant board will overrule whichever bad candidate slides into place for the next two years.

[Hibush]

Town-level races. Only one candidate for each slot, because only one party has been organized enough to get someone to run. That fact shows how little it would take to make change happen.

[Ruralguy]

We get the door to door thing in a big congressional year, especially when its also Presidential, occasionally for Governor and other state-wide offices, but almost never for local stuff.

Although I've historically been all over the place in terms of party, I decided in the last several elections just to reflexively go for "D" for a while because the "R"'s need to be taught a few lessons.
Won't mean anything (most likely) for my local races.

[kaysixteen]

I was pleased to be able to help vote out our corrupt mayor, who is currently facing 23 federal charges for everything from defrauding investors in a phony app business to shaking down would-be local licensees for newly legalized weed shops.

[nebo113]

Thinnest ballot I've seen in nearly 50 years of voting.  In my ultra red area, Reps and Dems have a head nod arrangement not to run against each other, so the Dems get to keep a few seats.  Infuriates me.

OTOH:  Moscow Mitch may face at least a small headwind next year.

[downer]

No major trends here in election results for local people. Mostly incumbents retained their seats, and both Dems and the Repubs had a few switches. There were no particular reports of large turnouts. So basically a non-event.

It is striking to me how there is such a lack of choice, and when there are other candidates not from the two main parties, they are mainly Conservative or Libertarian. There was one Working Families candidate on my ballot, which I guess is more progressive.

It is also striking that although there is a lot of basically right wing sentiment around my area, we still have such high property taxes, which mainly go to pay for schools and cops. It's almost as if people do actually believe in taxes.

[polly_mer]

It is also striking that although there is a lot of basically right wing sentiment around my area, we still have such high property taxes, which mainly go to pay for schools and cops. It's almost as if people do actually believe in taxes.

Many of us believe in taxes when we get services for those taxes.  Many of us are also quite angry about paying a ton in taxes and seeing no benefits to anyone for the large amounts of money spent, even if we're not the direct beneficiaries.

Here, we pay a ton in local taxes with excellent roads, excellent libraries with hours seven days a week, and such low crime rates that we have zeros in some categories for the year and shoplifting makes the front page of the newspaper when it occurs.  Other places we've lived, we paid slightly less than a ton in taxes and still had crummy roads, crummy schools, inadequately staffed police, and paid an annual user's fee for an OK library with crummy hours. 

Then, politicians in those other places had the nerve to ask to raise taxes for better roads/schools/libraries/police with sad little excuses on how they spent the already collected-and-earmarked funds for those areas on something else like shoring up the underfunded-for-decades pension plans (still not getting all the promised money to those who earned it).