I voted this morning at my local early vote location. The line was existent but not bad - I think I waited about 20 minutes. The machine seemed to work fine, though it is a receipt-free electronic touch screen thing, so there's no way to know if it actually recorded my vote properly. I would never choose this as a voting system, but without evidence of actual wrongdoing or systematic malfunctions, I'm not going to worry about it. It was certainly convenient and easy to use.I voted for Obama and I voted Democrat for the Congresscritters. I voted to retain and not retain judges in accordance with the committee's recommendations. I skipped several of the very local races where I know nothing about the candidates; I decided to let the people who are more informed (or more partisan, or whatever) decide those races.
I voted no on most of the ballot measures.
I voted against letting the gambling towns vote to have longer hours and higher-stakes games with most of the money going to fund community colleges.
I voted against making employers have good reasons for firing people.
I voted against something that was supposed to give more money to help the disabled.
I voted against higher severance taxes on oil and gas.
I voted against prohibiting affirmative action by the state. (Correction: I actually can't remember how I voted on this. I was torn.)
I voted against defining "person" in the Constitution to include fertilized eggs, embroys, and fetuses.
I voted against disallowing local governments from taking automatic deductions from paychecks except for legally required things. (This is about unions. I've intuited from the various ads that some firefighters and other public servants get union dues automatically withdrawn, though they can opt out if they wish. The new bill would have prohibited that. I decided not to prohibit it.)
I voted FOR making it illegal to require someone to be in a union to work at a certain place.
I voted against holding company executives criminally responsible for the criminal acts of their companies.
I voted against some very complicated thing about funding education. (This offensive TV ad about it didn't help.)
I voted against requiring companies with more than 20 employees to provide health insurance.
I voted against requiring companies to provide a safe working environment and making it easier for lawsuits to be filed if a worker is injured.
So, basically, I voted Democrat on the national parts of the ticket, and on some state races, and then voted against the common man for most local measures. Or something.
2 comments:
That was a pretty libertarian run of votes on the propositions.
I would have let the gambling towns gamble all night long if they wanted. Otherwise, I wouldn't necessarily disagree with any of the choices.
Right to Work is a hard one for me - I see both sides, but I generally end up falling on the same side as your vote - no mandatory unions. Strictly speaking, the relationship between a union and a company is a contract between two private organizations, and you can draw an analogy to a firm which hires AccountTemps - if both parties are willing to put an exclusivity clause in the contract, I don't see it as a particularly useful thing for government to be blocking it. The fly in the ointment is that unions get so many other regulatory privileges, they in some ways have a quasi-governmental authority, and it is dangerous to allow them to force themselves on a workforce. I have the same problem with union 'votes' which don't have secret ballots like 'card check'.
I would have voted for the bill if it just let gambling towns have more gambling. My objection to it was based on its TABOR-defeating properties where it was like "such-and-such amount of this money will go to community colleges and will be exempt from TABOR" etc. You kind of have to do that to pass a spending bill around here, but I don't like it. I think it turns the budget into some giant satisfiability problem ("let's see, I'm required to spend at least 10% of my income on food through 2011, but no more than 8% on my energy bill, but this other regulation requires me to spend at least $400/month on food, increased in line with inflation, and a fourth bill requires me to spend at least 1/4 more on food than on energy, except that a sixth bill says that ALL of the money I receive from my second job has to go to energy...")
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