Desultory Voting
.I voted today, although I have to admit that I did it without much enthusiasm. The major races don’t interest me that much, because it seems such a foregone conclusion that one of the front-runners will win, and I don’t support any of the front-runners. Indeed, Hillary Clinton took California, despite what seemed like a late push for Obama. Somehow I don’t see her (or Obama) representing my views too well…
There were also the ballot measures. I voted against limiting gasoline tax revenue to being used only on roads, which was an obvious choice, and I voted for a loosening of some of the term limits—I don’t like term limits in general, and I think they’re trying to solve a different problem, that of how difficult it is to unseat incumbents.
For the local measures, I voted against turning Alcatraz into some kind of peace theme center and for the other two, which were about parks and about police age limits.
The measures that seemed to have the most publicity around them, and which took up the most space on the ballot as a group, were about gambling. More specifically, about which tribes get to control the artificial pseudo-monopolies on where people can gamble away their cash. My big problem with this is that I just want gambling to be legal throughout the state (and country), but that viewpoint wasn’t really on the ballot.
More’s the pity. People gamble anyway, and making it legal only in select areas is obviously deeply flawed as an approach.