It’s the time of year to get informed about the huge pile of propositions on California’s ballot, as well as attempt to make sense of all of the local candidates. Luckily, there’s a good starting place: smartvoter.org. Put in your street address and zip code, and everything on your ballot will be served up.
Even better, candidates can create a Smart Vote page for free, so that users can just click on each candidate’s name to learn about them. (Candidates have to pay to get information in the printed booklet that’s mailed out.) It’s painless, and since the site is very well known, it’s a potentially huge amount of exposure in these highly-contested local races, where a handful of votes can make the difference.
Here’s what’s baffling to me: 6 out of 10 Fremont city council candidates did not bother to submit their information to smartvoter.org. Several school and community college board members, legislature candidates, and others couldn’t be bothered to. I guess they’re relying on their campaign literature, but I recycle nearly all of that garbage nearly immediately–at least smartvoter.org’s format forces candidates into a plain format and does away with the glossy photos and overproduced nonsense. And phone calls just make me irritated and less likely to vote for a candidate. I know I’m not alone, so what’s with the anemic participation?
I don’t know what’s behind it, and maybe there are even legitimate reasons. Still, when I look at the candidates who didn’t bother, I can’t help theorizing that just maybe…
- They’re lazy.
- They’re not good at time management or delegation.
- They do not possess even a minimal level of computer literacy.
- They have extraordinarily poor judgment.
- They believe we already know who they are. (Slightly arrogant in the case of Newsom, Fiorina, and Boxer, because not everyone’s lived here for 10 years; ridiculous in the case of local and dark-horse candidates.)
Hmmm. These don’t seem like qualities that I’d like to see in my elected officials.
Come on, local candidates: If you can spend so much money and time littering every possible street corner, tree, and fence in Fremont, Newark, Union City, and Milpitas with your plastic signs, (not to mention bombarding my house with mail and annoying phone calls), you could have spent the time to get your information out to more people and avoid looking lazy, disorganized, technologically illiterate, dumb, and arrogant.
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