Pennsylvania Primary

I've been neglecting this blog, but according to the stats so has the readership, so meh.

Pennsylvania's primary elections are coming up sometime soon. I don't know when, though. I live within walking distance of my polling place, so at a time like this when there seem to be no close calls obviously predicted for the Republican races I just kind of hear about the primaries a day or two beforehand and then do some research to make sure I don't vote for anything completely idiotic when I interrupt a nice afternoon walk with a trip to the voting machine.

One thing I want to point out to all of you, at least in Pennsylvania, is that on the day of the primary there can be non-partisan ballot questions that you can vote on even if you are not registered for a party. If these questions are lower than the state level you might not even know they exist unless you call around or show up at the polling place to look at the sample ballot. In fact, these ballot questions can sometimes be timed rather sneakily so that, for example, a local schoolboard has up a ballot question that only republicans would approve during a primary that has a hot republican race rather than during the previous fall's general election.

I urge you to find out about any non-partisan things that might be on your ballot and to go vote on those, even if you are an independent or a rather uninvolved party member.

Right now it looks like a Rendell-Swann race and a Casey-Santorum race, plus state and some local stuff. I'm for Swann and Casey unless their opponents impress me. Put another way, I'm voting for the ones who have no plans to be President.

peter's rules of disorder

Local primary elections here in Knoxville are May 2. Things are getting pretty hot for a lot of incumbents right now following a recent ruling by the State Supreme Court that term limits of two terms do apply to local elected officials. A county charter amendment to that effect was voted on only eleven years ago by local voters. Somehow the legal brains around here, with the help of more experienced wafflers over in Nashville, found ways to hem and haw about it.

The situation at the moment is this: if any long-serving incumbents win in the May 2 primaries, then the election committee will be in charge of doing something about enforcing the law. It doesn't exactly sound like a formula for bringing about a principled decision, which is why:

I'm going spare the Election Commission the heartbreaking work of ousting them relics off the November ballot by putting my vote to work. However, this work has to be balanced against my desire to vote as little as possible. Today's newspaper ran a "Sample Ballot and Election Special" section, which gave me all the information I need. Based on the candidates' answers to "Favorite book/show/movie/person" questions, and other biographical information, I've come up a set of rules for selecting honest, weird politicians (hat tip to Monty Python's skit "Election Night Special").

PETER'S RULES OF DISORDER

1. Incumbents are to be voted against (or abstained from)

2. UNLESS their opponent:
a. Lists a Jimmy Buffett or James Taylor song as their favorite.
OR
b. Lists "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People" or "The Road Less Traveled" or other self-help book as their favorite.
OR
c. Lists "Andy Griffith" (or "Andy Griffin") as their favorite TV show.
OR
d. Lists "Rocky Top" as their favorite song

3. Opponents are not to be voted for UNLESS they have demonstrably weird, non-mainstream:
a. Taste in books, such as liking Machiavelli's The Prince. [Some debate over whether liking this book is actually weird for an aspiring politician, or whether the weirdness consists in finding a politician who admits to liking this book.]
OR
b. Behavior, such as "competing in cowboy action-shooting competitions with Western-era firearms," among other things.
OR
c. Work habits involving a love of the natural world and lots of blisters, as in "About 10 years ago I planted 1,200 trees on our farm using a posthole digger and a shovel."

4. Candidates for school board will not be voted for or against unless their policy statement mentions evolution.

5. In the unlikely event that two or more candidates qualify as Suitably Weird, they will immediately proceed to a penalty shootout without pads.

END OF THE RULES

Applying these rules to the slate of candidates, I found six races [out of 49 total] where I am obliged to vote. In one case (for County Commission, 8th District, Seat A) I admittedly made a questionable call in going against the incumbent, who claims "more than 25 years" of experience selling caskets (and whose face has that 'fresh corpse' look to boot), based on his challenger's claimed support for "parks and recreation."

There remains a seventh race, dear reader, which is too close to call, and which I felt by the extraordinary nature of the two competitors justified breaking Rule #1 prohibiting voting for incumbents. So I am asking for your help with Rule #5, the penalty shootout. Do I vote for, as Circuit Court judge:
A) The challenger, aged 41, who "once worked on a long-line fishing boat in the Gulf of Alaska', whose favorite show is "Jeopardy," whose favorite movie is Napoleon Dynamite, and who studied in the "Russian program" at Norwich University;
OR
B) The incumbent, aged 63, who has a Ph.D from Yale in Germanic Languages and Literature (including a year spent studying in Austria), who runs 15 miles each week, and whose favorite book is Pride and Prejudice?

I see now that politics can be challenging.