This election has a bunch of kinda hard decisions on it and I’m taking longer than usual to figure out what to vote for (plus I got my county voters guide really late). At least I know to VOTE YES ON BERKELEY MEASURE H.
Here’s my cheat sheet:
| what | my vote |
|---|---|
| President | Joe Biden |
| County Committee, D14 | Alfred Twu, Avery Arbaugh, Carol Coyote, Chip Moore, Michael Cheng, Paola Laverde, and Sadia Khan? |
| US Senate, Full Term | BARBARA LEE |
| US Senate, Partial Term | BARBARA LEE |
| US Representative, D12 | Lateefah Simon |
| State Senate, D7 | Kathryn Lybarger? Or Jovanka Beckles? |
| State Assembly, D14 | Buffy Wicks |
| Superior Court Judge, Office 2 | Leave blank??? |
| Superior Court Judge, Office 12 | Mark Fickes? |
| Alameda County Supervisor, D5 | John Bauters |
| 1 (shift mental health funding, construction bond) | No? |
| Alameda County A (civil service exam notifications) | Yes |
| Alameda County B (better recall procedures) | YES |
| Berkeley H (don’t cut school budget by 20%) | YES!!! |
Reminder on how these elections work:
The Senate, Representative, State Senate, and State Assembly races are “top two primaries”. The top two candidates (regardless of parties) will be on the ballot in the November.
The County Supervisor and Judge races are “non-partisan elections”. On the surface, they look similar: candidates are listed without parties, and no more than two will make it to the November ballot. However, if any candidate gets 50% of the vote, they win outright without a November election at all. So (barring a tie or write-in shenanigans) we won’t be voting again in the Judge races.
The County Committee race (where 7 will win) takes place entirely on this ballot. Note that you must be a registered Democrat to vote in this race; being an independent voter who requests a Democratic Presidential ballot is not enough.
President: Joe Biden
Biden has slightly surpassed my low expectations for him, and it’s imperative he get as many votes as possible everywhere in November against Trump. I don’t really care about how people vote in this primary, though.
Democratic Party County Committee, Assembly District 14: Alfred Twu, Avery Arbaugh, Carol Coyote, Chip Moore, Michael Cheng, Paola Laverde, and Sadia Khan?
(If you’re not sure what this committee is, I explained it a bit four years ago.)
I guess I’ve been doing this for long enough that I already have opinions on many of the people running.
I always like voting for Alfred Twu for everything and maybe one day they will win.
I have voted for a lot of these candidates before, though often without super strong feelings. I voted for Paola Laverde for this committee in 2020 and for Rent Board in 2018. I voted for Ana Vasudeo in 2020 for School Board. I voted for Elizabeth Echols (somewhat tepidly) in 2020 for East Bay Regional Park District Director. I voted for Andy Kelley for Rent Board in 2020.
At the moment, I’m leaning towards choosing “the slate Alfred Twu is on”: Alfred Twu, Avery Arbaugh, Carol Coyote, Chip Moore, Michael Cheng, Paola Laverde, and Sadia Khan. Very swayable though!
US Senate: BARBARA LEE (vote for her twice!)
Barbara Lee has been my Congressional representative since I moved to Berkeley and has long had one of the best moral balances in Congress. Famously, she was the only member of Congress to avoid being swept up in post-9/11 jingoism and dissent from the authorization of military force. More recently she was one of the first members of Congress to call for a ceasefire in the horrific cynical ongoing massacre in Gaza that is doing nothing to make the world safer for Jews like myself, nor even proving particularly effective at its supposed goal of freeing hostages. I am proud to vote for Barbara Lee for Senate.
I recognize that according to the polls, she is in fourth behind Adam Schiff, Republican Steve Garvey, and Katie Porter, and that I’d probably prefer Porter to Schiff. There is something a little attractive in voting for Porter to give her a chance in November, but “undecided” is still polling strongly as well, and I’m voting my heart here.
Note that there are two separate places to vote for Senator: one will serve an incredibly brief term until January 3rd, and the other will serve the full 6 year term. Vote in both places!
US Representative, District 12: Lateefah Simon
I enthusiastically voted for Lateefah Simon for BART Director in 2016 and 2020.
Full disclosure: I donated to her 2020 BART campaign, and apparently that was enough for her to personally give me a surprise phone call last July when her campaign started. I told her I had been happy to vote for her for BART Board in the past but that I hadn’t necessarily been paying close attention to her accomplishments as Director. She laughed and was happy to sell me on what she had done. She talked about the BART Ambassador program (non-police folks connecting homeless folks on trains with mental health services, etc), getting money for BART from the state, making labor peace with the unions (including raises for cops even though the police union effectively views her as an enemy), and decreased youth fare. She wants to be a voice for transit justice at the national level, something that matters for me.
I also don’t think any of the other candidates seem particularly strong. So I’m happy to vote once again for Lateefah Simon.
State Senate, District 7: Kathryn Lybarger? Or Jovanka Beckles?
Oh boy. This race.
Let’s see.
There’s Sandré Swanson. The last time this seat lacked an incumbent, the race was between him and Nancy Skinner, and they both seemed excellent to me. Fast-forward eight years, and he’s gone strong law-and-order, with all the police union endorsements. No thank you.
There’s my mayor, Jesse Arreguín. I have been unimpressed with him for years. I didn’t vote for him in 2016 because he was too NIMBY for me… and now he’s somehow the YIMBY candidate of choice. But not in a way that made me think “he’s learned and improved”… more “he lacks principals and just cares about finding a way to keep getting elected”. I voted for him in 2020 but only because his most credible challenger was literally a cult leader. While the mayor of Berkeley is in some ways just an at-large City Council member with extra ceremonial duties, he has presided over a disaster of a city government, seeing the entire transportation department falling apart over harassment from anti-safety activists and multiple City Council members (including Rigel Robinson, who I was excited to support in this fall’s mayoral election before he dropped out) quitting over harassment as well. There’s nothing to be proud of in his record here.
Dan Kalb is the City Council member for the Oakland district a few blocks away from me. My vague impression is that folks feel like he talks a good talk and gets nothing much done.
Jeanne Solnordal is a Republican.
So that leaves Kathryn Lybarger and Jovanka Beckles. I hadn’t heard much about Lybarger before. She is incredibly union-focused. Her politics look generally good? Beckles on the other hand I’m quite familiar with: I voted for her for State Assembly in 2018 both in the primary and general, and with much more enthusiasm for her current AC Transit Director seat. I’ll be honest: I think she’s been a great AC Transit Director. I’ve seen quite a few votes in the past four year where she along with Jean Walsh and maybe one other director were on the losing side of a vote… and it’s not clear to me that replacing her would be a good thing! I kind of wish she was happier to serve another term for AC Transit rather than look “upwards”. (Note that AC Transit is transitioning from “5 districts and 2 at-large” to “7 districts” this year and I don’t think I’ll be in her district any more even if she wins re-election.)
Interestingly I’ve been getting a lot of supposedly pro-Beckles mailers that are entirely anti-Lybarger attack ads. They’re funded by folks like “California Association of REALTORS” and “California Building Industry Assocation”. Remember that the 2018 caricature of Beckles was that she was a wild NIMBY! Something gives me the feeling these folks are not actually pro-Beckles, but have just identified who the most progressive candidates are and have latched on to anybody to stop Lybarger. Similarly, Uber is shelling out plenty for Arreguín.
Honestly, the degree to which anti-union forces are freaking out about Lybarger attracts me to her and I’m leaning towards voting for her (and hoping Beckles gets re-elected to the AC Transit board in November).
State Assembly, District 14: Buffy Wicks
I didn’t vote for Wicks in 2018 but didn’t buy into the caricatures being drawn of her at the time, and I’m not surprised that she’s been generally on the spectrum from inoffensive to pretty good, and at this point I’m happy to vote for her instead of giving a protest vote to her annual token challenger. I’m not particular impressed by Margot Smith, who appears to be much more of a NIMBY than she claims to be, and whose main current issue appears to be People’s Park, a situation that I find sad but not particularly motivating this decade.
Superior Court Judge, Office 5: Leave blank
Superior Court Judge, Office 12: Mark Fickes
This pair of elections offers an interesting contrast.
Four years ago I thought Mark Fickes was basically fine but not quite as exciting as his opponent. So all else being equal, I’m happy to vote for him this year.
Now, there is a bit of a scandal in this race. When interviewed by the Alameda County Democratic Party for their potential endorsement and asked who he voted for in the last DA election, he said he voted for the current DA rather than refusing to answer. This is apparently an ethics code violation in his particular word: It would create bias if anyone had reason to know that a judge favors the DA politically. I haven’t actually tried to parse the relevant ethics code, but it seems like this is being reported on accurately.
But.
There’s another judicial election on the ballot. This one has a single candidate running unopposed: Terry Wiley. There is basically no commentary on this election to be found online. Wiley doesn’t even seem to have a campaign site or anything.
Does the name Terry Wiley ring a bell?
That’s right. Running unopposed is the guy who lost the last DA general election!
So apparently I’m supposed to decide a potential judge stating that he voted (along with the majority of voters) for the current DA is a careering-ending breach of ethics, but I’m supposed to pretend that the guy she beat will have no bias at all in cases involving her?
I can easily believe that they are both professionals who will behave responsibly towards DA Price and her employees. But the cognitive dissonance required to believe that it’s more improper to know a single vote one judge passed than to know actual electoral history is impossible for me.
I think I will decline to vote for the person I did not deem fit to be DA, and I won’t allow the fact that Fickes may have slightly breached the code to make me vote against him. After all, if “fairness in how the DA is treated by judges” is such an important part of the decision-making process, electing a judge who voted for the DA is the least we can do to balance out electing a judge who ran against the DA.
Alameda County Supervisor, District 5: John Bauters
County Supervisor is a position that often is out of the spotlight yet has a lot of power over how many institutions in the county run, and rarely has elections without an incumbent. The retiring Supervisor Keith Carson has held the position for 32 years!
I think I’m going to vote for Emeryville City Council member John Bauters. He’s consistently impressed me as a compassionate advocate for causes I care about, especially street safety and transportation (including shocking his colleagues on the Bay Area Air Quality Management District by biking to a meeting — literally the main regional government board dedicated to minimizing air pollution!) and construction of both market-rate and affordable housing. I’ve only heard positive things about him as an individual and have generally been impressed by his thoughtful takes on issues. (That said, my experience of him has mostly been casual, like seeing him on social media. There are certainly those who consider him to be conservative for Emeryville, though I don’t fully understand the biases of that source. And his campaign is a tad on the law-and-order side, though it’s the firefighter union endorsement he’s trumpeting, not cop unions.)
While I don’t follow the Oakland City Council in depth, I’ve also only heard good things about Nikki Fortunato Bas and would be happy to see her elected as well. If the two of them make it to November I’ll think more carefully about each of them; if one of them makes it then that’s probably my choice.
Ben Bartlett is my City Council member. While I begrudgingly voted for him in 2020, my previous commentaries on him should explain why I’m not excited to vote for him again.
1 (shift mental health funding, construction bond): No?
This one is complex.
From a procedural front, this was put on the ballot by a large majority vote in the legislature with no Democrats voting no. I do generally believe that our elected representatives should be able to do complex things and that voting yes on bills of this form should be the default.
The bond aspect of this bill looks mostly reasonable: issuing a bond for construction of mental health care, drug/alcoholism rehab facilities, and housing for related issues. There is a concern that this is pushing for an increase in forced-treatment facilities, though I’m not sure about this.
Then there’s the other part, which updates the funding allocation from a 20-year-old tax. First, it shifts some money from county programs to state programs. This isn’t a huge shift though (changing the ratio from 95%/5% county/state to 90%/10%), so I’m not that concerned. Secondly, it requires counties to spend more of their funding from the tax on housing, employment assistance, and education, vs on other mental health services like treatment, direct response, and outreach.
This last part is the biggest concern for me: it will lead to cuts to many local programs regardless of their effectiveness.
The California ACLUs and League of Women Voters are urging NO votes on this proposition. On the other hand, the Alameda County Green Party supports the proposition, and while I take the Green Party’s endorsements with a huge grain of salt, it’s well reasoned (and it’s not like they tend to find “the Democrats in Sacramento voted for it” to be compelling).
While I think there are good aspects of this proposition and that normally I’d be inclined to rubber-stamp something that passed the legislature by this margin, I am leaning towards voting no.
Alameda County A (civil service exam notifications): Yes
This is a small change to county hiring placed on the ballot by unanimous approval of the Board of Supervisors (I found the video of the October 24th meeting to verify this fact). It’s only on the ballot because our elected officials aren’t allowed to change the law. The only opposition is from the the far-right “taxpayers association”. Yes sounds good.
Alameda County B (better recall procedures): YES
The recall election process has been repeatedly hijacked in recent years. The concept behind recall is noble: if an elected official has done something truly beyond the pale but refuses to step down, the people can take action. However, recent recalls have generally been something different: the losers of an election immediately put forth a recall campaign to try to get the result they want without even needing to find an attractive candidate. The cynical attempt to recall DA Pamela Price (which started before she even took office, and is embarrassingly largely bankrolled by a high school classmate of mine) is likely to lead to another sore-loser election this year like the one that sadly ousted San Francisco’s Chesa Boudin. (And of course, whatever it was that Boudin’s opponents hated about San Francisco and pinned directly on Boudin hasn’t magically gotten better with their candidate Brooke Jenkins in the seat, but that doesn’t stop opponents of police accountability from trying the same strategy again and again.)
This measure updates the recall process to make it more consistent with most other counties. And yes, it makes it a bit harder to qualify for a recall election by increasing the number of signatures (not by an arbitrary number, but just to the default amount for counties without their own rules). This is a good thing. Recalls should be sparingly used in cases where the incumbent has unequivocally done something unethical… cases where getting plenty of signatures should be straightforward. Vote yes on B.
Berkeley H (don’t cut school budget by 20%): YES!!!
I’ll just say more or less what I said eight years ago.
This renews (sort of) a property tax that provides 20% of school district funding. (I say “sort of” because it is adjusted for inflation.) We need these “per square foot” taxes because Prop 13 limits the amount we can choose to spend on services taxed in a fairer “based on property value” way. Without this, BUSD loses a huge amount of funding. Please vote YES ON H, which requires two-thirds yes to win!