Voting in California - Fall 2016

2016-10-29 12:26 PDT

Voting in California this year is quite a task. There are 17 state ballot measures and various county and local ordinances to learn about. Pulling together the resources to understand the candidates and proposals can be time consuming and unproductive. This blog post is intended to compile resources regarding the 2016 California ballot for Arcata, CA. I will not be injecting much opinion about any of the measures.

Many times it's easy to just vote no when uncertainty exists about a measure even after doing basic research on the topic. However, there is also the option of leaving the candidate, measure, or ordinance blank so as to not sway the votes one-way or another:

http://www.calvoter.org/voter/faq.html#q26

On my ballot there are four levels of voting: federal, state, county, and city. Except for federal, these can be further broken down into candidate races and

Federal

President of the USA

No comment other than that parties need 5% of the vote to earn federal funding.

US Senator

Two democrats are running for the one seat left by democrat Barbara Boxer: Kamala D. Harris and

Loretta L. Sanchez.

It's unclear to me what differentiates them. They agree on major issues.

 

US Representative in Congres, District 2

Jared W. Huffman (D - Incumbent) http://www.jaredhuffman.com/

Dale K. Mensing (R) does not appear to have an official campaign website. He does have an entry in ballotpedia.org (https://ballotpedia.org/Dale_Mensing)

State

State Assembly District 2

Jim Wood (D - Incumbent)

Ken Anton (L)

State Wide Propositions

There are 17 state propositions to wade through.

The Secretary of State provides a voter guide to the propositions: http://voterguide.sos.ca.gov/

State political parties provides guides on the proposition

A table comparing the different political party and other interest groups would be fantastic and hopefully someone already made one and published it somewhere. California Choices seems to have done just that https://www.californiachoices.org/ballot-endorsements-november-8-2016

Humboldt County

Measure H and Measure I - see the Arcata School District's FAQ on H and I
(http://arcataschooldistrict.org/wp-content/uploads/FAQs-for-Measures-H-and-I.pdf)

Measure Q - Consolidates Auditor-Controller and Treasurer-Tax Collector functions into the Department of Finance.

Measure R - If Q passes, should the Department of Finance manager be elected

Q and R are related and I found an interesting conversation about it here: ... on LOCO ... unfortunately ...
https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2016/oct/5/loco-votes-what-hell-are-measures-q-and-r/

 

Arcata Precinct 3A

Measure U
Measure V

There are a lot of articles in favor of V and a few against V. Some articles also try and expose people who may be funding the opposition to Measure V.

Measure F

Douglas R. Saucedo
Copy Right 2016