The newspapers are issuing voter recommendations, and I don't see why individuals shouldn't be able to as well. Below is a template you can use to create your own voter recommendations for the March 5 elections.

Cut and paste it into the newswire, and tell the world how you're going to vote.

Template for voter recommendations.---------------------------

Name, Party Affiliation(s), and Personal Statement

Prop 40. Bonds for Conservation and Parks

Prop 41. Voting Equipment Bonds

Prop 42. Transportation Funding

Prop 43. Right to Have Vote Counted

Prop 44. Chiropractors

Prop 45. Term Limits

Candidates

No on 42, 44 and 45. Do not vote for the Democrat-Republicans as they are both proud war-mongering, pro-Israel, anti-civil libertarian, pro-prison and pro-death penalty parties. In other words, they are capitalist parties, bought and paid for by the same corporations. No worker, those of us who sell our labor for less than ,000 per year, has any business voting for their oppressor, namely the capitalist Democrat-Republican parties. If you are still registered in one of them, change your registration now to Decline to State until we have a socialist party on the ballot again. Always vote your hopes, not your fears. Never play the reactionary and insulting "lesser evil" game for you will surely receive evil. We can only move forward when we reject the Democrat-Republicans and support candidates who represent us. For a while, that means we will vote only on the propositions and skip the people.

Name, Party Affiliation(s), and Personal Statement

John Kawakami

Green, though I've also been P&F, Democrat, Repubican, and (I think) AIP.

I'm an apathetic voter. I don't usually vote for candidates, and only on a few propositions. I do spend an inordinately long time thinking about it, though. I'm a big nobody in electoral politics, and politics in general.



Prop 40. Bonds for Conservation and Parks

A 2.6 billion bond measure, with cumulative costs of 4.3 billion over 25 years. There are around 34 million people in the state.* That works out to 76 dollars per person. Measured in "value meals", that's approximately 21 lunches. Measured in movie tickets, that's around 8 or 9 full price movies (without popcorn).

Unfortunately (or fortunately, if you enjoy debt) it's spread out over 25 years, so with interest added, you can double all the numbers. Ideally, this kind of expense would be just that - an ongoing expense taken from the general budget. Projects eligible for these funds could be rotated in on some schedule, and parks and historical structures would get cash infusions for capital repairs every decade or so.

Overall, though, multicultural neighborhood structures of community involvement in building common public spaces would be better. Maintaining a park is cheap, if nobody is using it. Heavily used parks can easily raise funds from the local community.

Probably YES.

* http://recenter.tamu.edu/Data/pops/pops06.htm



Prop 41. Voting Equipment Bonds

How many people voted in the 1998 congressional elections?

http://www.fec.gov/pages/reg&to98.htm

Only 35% of the eligible people voted. This was a whopping 8.3 million. Doing some division, that's 5 million voters / 8.3 million = around per person. That's spread out over ten years, so, per year.

That doesn't mean that your taxes go up by . Only 35% of the eligible voters use the equipment. Also there are a lot of ineligible taxpayers in California; aliens, resident and illegal pay taxes, as do ex-felons. So the rise in taxes is less than . Unlike the parks bond above, this is clearly an infrequent, one time expense (unless it's voting computers, in which case it'll be overpriced and obsolescent).

YES



Prop 42. Transportation Funding

This restricts the use of fuel taxes for transportation purposes. The net effect will be to make more money available for road repair, and less for non-transportation uses (mostly social services). No strong opinion here.

The fuel tax is relatively direct, but restricting it's use would seem to advantage oil and car companies, because it would keep fuel prices low. Raising the net gas price, while regressive, also makes people think twice about driving a gas guzzler, and has the effect of slowing down the economy (and thus, fuel consumption).

Having a stable fund for buses is nice. On the other hand, cuts in social spending would be painful. Probably NO.



Prop 43. Right to Have Vote Counted

43 is an amendment to the state Constitution that declares that a vote cast must be counted. Sounds pretty obvious, and why it must be amended is not clear to me. YES, based on principle.



Prop 44. Chiropractors

No opinion. Don't use a chiro, and don't like the insurance industry.



Prop 45. Term Limits

Seems confusing. Why not simply extend the term limit by one term? This change adds an opportunity to extend a term limit if you have the resources to fund a petition drive. It could be an opportunity to buy votes. Of course, the current system encourages big spending and a media driven election too.

NO



Candidate Statements

About Prop 34. If you look in your sample ballot, there are candidate statements. In order to get a statement in the book, you need to declare officialy that you'll follow some voluntary limits on campaign contributions. The twist is that you also must pay for the printing costs to get in the book. Though I don't know the exact cost, with around 14 million registered voters in California, it cannot be cheap. Only five statements were printed, giving you an idea of how democratic this really is. The dual barriers of spending limits combined with the high cost of printing basically opens this forum up only to popular Democrats and Republicans.

The Greens and other third parties didn't file a statement, though they should have. Simply filing puts you on the list of candidates who agreed to spending limits, making you look populist.

Way to go, guys.



I usually don't vote on a candidate unless there's a crisis situation, like a really evil person running for office. Sometimes, I'll know someone, or someone who knows someone, and I'll vote to help them out. Electoral politics are not about issues, but about personalities and being a team player. Without strong party unity, you won't get into power.

My only tips are: I've seen Jackie Goldberg and Judy Chu at some demos. I've also noticed that Gloria Molina's office is really quick to noticy NIMBYs. Lee Baca hooked up with a rich Chinese woman to get into SGV politics, making his own one-on-one Latin-Asian alliance. Garcetti's not up for anything, but he lets the ill-mannered clan at KillRadio use the meeting space at his office. Unless the local Thai restaurants dis him, I got no problem with him.

Also, if you want a fun read, check out the shit on Mervyn Dymally on the LA Weekly site. http://www.laweekly.com/ink/02/15/endorsements2.shtml

Sheesh.