Votive Offerings

Welcome, well-informed reader. Now it won't have escaped your attention that there's an election coming up over here in the US at the beginning of November. Yes, there's a Presidential election coming.

The great Bill Hicks had something very wise to say about this: "I ascribe to Mark Twain's theory that the last person who should be President is the one who wants it the most. The one who should be picked is the one who should be dragged kicking and screaming into the White House." Let me just say that the actions of the current incumbent over the last few months show that he is desperate to keep his current job. My personal theory is that Donald J Trump is a creature created by the Bush family to make people think that George W Bush wasn't so incompetent after all. But anyway, America faces a stark choice at this election: either another awful 4 years, or an even more awful 2.5 months between the election and the inauguration of Biden.

Back in the UK we're used to people putting up window posters in support of particular candidates. Here, people put up neat little signs in their front gardens:

I've tried to find a Trump/Pence sign to provide some political balance. As far as I can tell, there's one in the entirety of the city of Palo Alto, but it was too far away to walk when we were out last night; sorry folks!

We're not just electing a President here. We're also electing City Council members:

There are 10 folks on the ballot for this; not sure how many seats are up for grabs. Anyway, as you'll notice, only one of these signs mentions a political affiliation. Not sure whether the others all happen to be independents, or whether there's something else going on, but it's an interesting difference with respect to politics in the UK.

What's more, come November people will be voting on a set of what's called propositions for California. These are basically referenda, and there's a ton of them: 12 to be precise. Part of the constitution here appears to be to have both mandatory and optional referenda for various bits of legislature, and after all, recent UK history shows that referenda are a simply spiffing idea, so why not have more of them?

The 12 propositions each have campaigns behind them, and some of them even have enough funding to run TV adverts. The highest-profile of these is Prop 22, which wants to enact changes to the workers' rights of app-based rideshare drivers; perhaps unsurprisingly, Uber and Lyft are funding a significant campaign to influence this vote.

But wait, there's more! We're also electing folks for the Palo Alto School Board!

In UK parlance, the School Board appears to be somewhere between the Board of Governors of an individual school, and the people that run a Local Education Authority. Again, to us, publicly electing these folks seems a bit weird, but that's the way it is.

So anyway, I've yet to see a picture of a ballot paper here, but it's going to be pretty big - there's a lot to do! We're excited to see how these elections turn out; in the case of the Presidential election, to borrow a term from Google, uncomfortably excited.