Handle with care

Arg, I had trouble deciding whether to write about the effectiveness of endorsements or about fragile people on social media.  Based on the title clearly I went with fragile people on social media.   Maybe it’s just me but generally the fragile people end up being dudes.

So, remember when a lot of people reported being systemically blocked by then City Council candidate and now City Council member-elect Tony Daysog?  A few people made excuses for him (figures) and he claimed to only allow “journalists” to view his account.   But bottom line is he blocked people from his account so that people wouldn’t be able to view his historic tweets like these which made him sound super professional:

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Adulting

I wanted to revisit this post for a minute because the part I didn’t talk about, the implications of the Planning Board and the City Council not doing anything, is important.

Let me set the context.  Remember during the election when the purportedly “good government” group put out, essentially, lies about Mayor-elect Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft.  The leader of the ACT PAC/ A Better Alameda group decided to respond here by throwing down a comment and a link and then never returning in a dramatic failed mic drop.  I detailed the wrongness of the comment in that post, but what I did want to write about was the full context of the vote by the Planning Board, of which Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft was a member, and the vote (and responsibility of the City Council) of which she was not a member of at the time.

And I’ll even use the link provided by ACT PAC/A Better Alameda.  The context of those policy decisions came because this was during the period the City needed to bring its Housing Element into compliance.  Mind you, this was not a future Housing Element, this was a Housing Element that had been submitted for 2009 – 2014 and had been found out of compliance at the time it was submitted.  Because we’re really great about electing punters to the City Council.  So once a new Council majority was elected in 2010 and a new City Manager brought on board, it was time to have some adults do some adult level decision making.

Will of the people

Depending on how close the Registrar is close to finish we might have to wait until the last ballot is counted to feel like Jim Oddie has locked up that third seat.

As Mike McMahon reported, there was quite a bit counted over the weekend, a little over 2000 votes.

From Mike McMahon’s comment:

Oddie’s momentum has stalled out when it reached a peak of 407 votes in release two and Oddie’s lead is down to 380 over Matz.

What is stunning is the amount of vote by mail ballots that been received as of Sunday. With 25,982 vote by mail ballots being reported as received, the voter turnout percentage for vote by mail voters is at 73%. My calculations for voter turnout for voters who go to the polls on Election Day is in the low 50s%.

It appears that the later ballots have trended more conservatively with Robert Matz and Tony Daysog taking higher percentages of those shares of ballots than they had trended previously.  A lot of people have different ways of tracking, I like to see the trend per tally release:

Put a fork in it

This race is (mostly) over people, nothing to see here except waiting for concession messages to come out.  Stewart Chen has already made his concession. But no one else yet.

According to the Registrar of Voters website, about 55% of vote by mail ballots have been returned:

As Mike McMahon posted there probably are a few thousand ballots left to process, but the trend is not looking good for the folks who were behind after the ballot box votes had been calculated on election night/morning.

Substance over style

Just in case Robert Matz stays at fourth place and doesn’t get the seat on the City Council I wanted to be able to mock this flyer before it was too late.

I received this last week on my door and perhaps Robert Matz was counting on everyone picking up the door hanger at night and maybe not seeing the whited-out sections, but this was a rare day that I walked in through the front door in full sunlight.

Usually I just toss any election materials into a pile but this one didn’t have an FPPC number.  Then I noticed the white out sections.  Then I scratched off the white out:

Got my Matz door hanger today. No FPPC # but this was the best part #alamtg pic.twitter.com/NLXlqqpvRb

— Lauren Do (@laurendo) November 2, 2018

Holy forking shirt

Subtitle: and now we wait.

Of the three races the one that still hangs in the balance is the race for Mayor.

But if these margins hold or the lead gets bigger for Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft we’ll need to look at the race for third place in the City Council race.   According to political numbers guru, Mike McMahon, as the ballots were counted throughout the night the lead widened for Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft but now Trish Spencer is in the exact position that Marie Gilmore was, with a sub 300 vote difference between her and her competitor.  But it’s not over, as it never is in California, because even though all the precincts have been accounted for there are a lot of outstanding ballots to be counted.  Mike McMahon thinks around 10,000 which makes sense because in 2014 there were around 21,000 votes cast in Alameda.  Right now we’re looking at a little less than 16K votes tallied.

Open election thread

I’m pretty done with this whole local election if I’m going to be super honest.  I tried reflecting on what I’ve had so much less energy this time around and I think it’s just from the sheer exhaustion from the national craziness that has made me so less tolerant of our local election.

Anyway, open thread, have it.  I’ll be watching Florida, Georgia, and Texas for some of the more dramatic match ups.

 

Exercise your right

I’m not even going to do a traditional Brian – Heart – Gut post today because I don’t want t jinx it.  But if you’re interesting in bragging rights you can most on down to Mike McMahon’s election prediction form and try your hand at local punditry.  Sometimes it’s really hard to put aside your personal preferences and try to logically figure out who will win and who will not.

A few things I do want to point out though before tomorrow’s election is I’ve seen some post on social media about an uninformed vote is worse than not voting (or something along those lines) and I’m utterly thankful for this tweet thread which goes through the history of the historic (and brutal) struggle for franchise.

I just saw a couple tweets complaining about how people were trying to persuade them to get out and vote this year.

As someone who's researched the voting rights struggle, I've always found that dismissive attitude pretty infuriating. But never more than now.

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) November 5, 2018

Who I’m voting for

I’m not going to cover every race and — somehow — this election season seemed endless but also it went by way too fast.  I was supposed to do profiles of each candidate and keep up my endorsement tracking page, but I seem to have run out of time.   Anyway, on with how I’m going to mark up my part of my ballot over the weekend.

Mayor: Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft

This is one of those times I really, really, really wish there was ranked choice voting.  Because even though I’m voting for Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft I think there will be some people torn between her and Frank Matarrese.  His message and platforms have hewn very closely to Marilyn Azzy Ashcraft‘s over the last few months and he’s definitely running a more laidback campaign.   In fact, if you are basing the effort that the candidate is putting into running for office then Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft deserves to win hands down.   But more than just working to actually win, she’s been a reliably informed vote on the City Council.  Folks may not like her roundabout style of setting up context before she deliberates, but it’s clear that Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft has done her homework prior to getting on that dais.  She doesn’t have a beef with staff and understands the usefulness of subject matter experts on issues of complexity.  This is important to note because apparently some people feel that gut intuition or longevity on this particular piece of dirt called Alameda is a replacement for education and reputation.   She also is willing to be the adult in the room, and has proved it time and time again, to make the difficult and sometimes unpopular positions because it has to be done, legally.  So to vote for the sober, thoughtful adult who can win: (because I don’t think Frank Matarrese has run a robust enough campaign to win but he fits most of what I wrote above although ideologically I disagree with his positions more ) vote Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft.

City Council: John Knox White

This was by far the easiest choice for me.  Not because John Knox White is my friend but because we deserve someone like John Knox White on the City Council.  This may be his first go round for elected office, but he knows how the City Council (and this Alameda City government) works.  He doesn’t need to learn how anything works, he doesn’t need figure out that everything that he’s been spouting and promising during the campaign simply won’t work or can’t happen, he doesn’t need to reach back into the annals of history to come up with accomplishments — John Knox White is ready to serve.   Much like Marilyn Ezzy Ashcraft he values the subject matter experts and the important information they can provide to make an informed decision that is data-backed.  That’s so crucial in these days of anti-intellectualism.  He’s a great consensus builder and showed that on his time on the Planning Board where he was successfully able to build to a medium place agreements with Planning Board members who were placed on the Board for sheer obstruction alone.   That shows the John Knox White will be able to work with anyone on the City Council, even the most obdurate ones if they’re coming from a place of good faith and reasonableness.   Vote John Knox White for informed thoughtfulness and consensus building.

I understood that reference

I think my first reaction to this was: holy shit this is a great video.

It’s not often that you get a fully annotated political rap video that is actually good.