Not vote? Well, this is a complicated topic that I’ll need to elaborate carefully. I raised it in some social video posts, then realized I’ll need to provide more background and explain how I got to this as a critical issue for our democracy. The headline is simple enough:
When people guess on their ballots, money wins.
The main message for voters is:
It’s ok to “skip” specific contests.
In fact, skipping is so much better than guessing that I want to make that part of my campaign. Still, this is a longer-term goal, so I can’t make it a central theme this late in the primary.
I was inspired to explore this by the odd coincidence of my name appearing first on my ballot, in an otherwise alphabetically sorted list, specifically:
- Minner (first?)
- Denney
- Gallagher
- Karrman
- Kelly
- McGuire
Alphabetically I’d be last on the list! It looked like for some strange reason (computer hack?) I was simply moved to the top. The truth is a strange coincidence1, really just a matter of how we shuffle the name order in California since 1975.
But it raised the general question: Why does it matter whose name is first on the ballot? And the related question: Why is so much campaign money and energy spent on “name recognition” and the like, rather than really informing voters about who the candidates are?
There have certainly been a lot of efforts to improve voter education, and a few forays into protesting with “none of the above” ballot choices (as in Nevada), but I think we’re missing something more fundamental: Treating a ballot like a multiple-choice test is at the root of our political dysfunction as a representative democracy.
This is one important gear in our broken political machine, but I can’t dive too deep at this point in the Primary. If I make it to the General (with your help!) I’ll certainly highlight it as the serious issue that it is.
For now, I’ll just summarize how I see voting options, from best to worst:
- Learn about the choices and select one — Democracy at its finest! Many people working on this.
- Vote by political party — If you like party leadership running the country, that’s your choice.
- Skip — You don’t need to mark every ballot contest. This is perfectly fine! It does not make you a bad citizen.
- Guess — Money wins!
Probably the simplest reform is just to have a “Skip” choice first on every ballot contest. No judgment as to why, just a way to say “my choice here is to not choose among the options offered”.
- What happened? Well, every election since 1975, the California Secretary of State selects a random alphabet order. It’s explained here, and you can see this year’s random shuffle here. That changed the order to McGuire, Minner, Denney, Gallagher, Karrman, Kelly, which is “almost alphabetical”, but with M before D, G, K — the first coincidence. But then I happen to be in State Assembly District 2, which meant for me and my neighbors the list gets “rotated once”, which is what moved McGuire to the bottom, leaving me at the top of an otherwise “alphabetical list”. Weird. ↩︎