sports betting (yea)
school board seat (I don’t remember who I voted for)
congressional rep (I voted for the incumbent Democrat)
circuit court judges (I voted for everyone except the libertarian)
a bunch of budget referendums (I let them have their money …this time)
President
Representative
Assembly member
One judge
One school board member
Mayor
One city council member
Three water district directors
Two hospital directors
12 state propositions
Two county propositions
One city proposition
One hospital district proposition
President and Vice President, of course.
House of Representatives and State Assembly, because those are every two years.
But then it drops off. New York does not have a Governor or a Senator up for election this year. My State Senator is up for re-election but he’s running unopposed. After that, it’s local offices. But not town offices; we hold the town election early (probably so the college students can’t vote).
Changing the name of our state to ‘The State of Rhode Island’.
President and vice-president. Biden/Harris, Trump/Pence, Hawkins/Walker (Green), Jorgensen/Cohen (Libertarian), Pierce/Ballard (Independence).
US House. Mitrano D, Reed R, or Kostee (Libertarian).
Justice of the (State) Supreme Court. Vote for up to 4 out of 7. Most on more than one line; one of them is running simultaneously as D, R, Conservative and Working Families. I’m not sure whether this means there’s actually a consensus that they’re a high quality and fair judge, or only that the parties all wanted to endorse four and ran out of options.
– (For those who don’t know: in New York parties can cross-endorse. Votes on different party lines for the same candidate are added together.)
State Senator. Leslie Danks Burke D or Thomas OMara R, both of them also on several other lines.
State Assembly. R candidate running unopposed, bah.
County coroner, also running unopposed.
Two very local propositions, both involving the structure of county government.
That’s a nice theory, but I don’t generally know anyone who knows the judicial candidates on my ballot.
Tried that.
First of all, they’re bound and determined (I tried two different browsers) that I’m two counties over from where I actually am.
As it happens, it’s the same state judicial district. (it’s not the same district for anything else.) So it’s the same seven judicial candidates on the ballot. But they have no information at all for four of them; and for the other three they’ve got only basic biographical information.
In general, I find it next to impossible to find out anything about the state judicial candidates. The best I can do is to search for their names and see whether anybody pops up a lot of upset news articles; which almost never happens; and to guess at what I can from their bios – for example, somebody who puts in their bio that they’re the child of immigrants presumably isn’t biased against immigrants, or at least wants me to think that they aren’t.
And, see above: sometimes even the party line isn’t useful.
Did you actually put your address in, or just allow it to use the location?
I hadn’t had a problem with it, and I used it to look up ballots of people all over the place.
Yeah, they only have the information that is given to them. They send out questionnaires to everyone running, but if they don’t return them, there’s not much they can do.
I am resentful over candidates that can’t even put together a webpage, or even just a facebook page, for their campaign.
I didn’t allow it to use the location. I put the address in, though I put in the next street over and left off the street number. I included the town and zip code, neither of which include any portion of the county the site thought I was in.
The judges aren’t allowed, themselves, to say anything at all about any of the cases they’ve heard or the judgements they made. That basic stuff in the bios is pretty much all they’re allowed to say – they can also apparently mention if the organizations that do such things listed them as qualified or highly qualified or whatever.
What I’d like to know is whether they made any controversial decisions and if so what was controversial about them; whether there’s any evidence they tend to lean toward prosecution or accused and if so which; how well they instruct juries if they’ve heard juried cases; whether they tend to hand down light sentences or heavy sentences in particular types of cases, and if so whether they do so more for some categories of accused than others; and how much attention they pay to the details of particular cases. And it makes a certain amount of sense that the judges themselves aren’t allowed to discuss any of that. But it usually seems that nobody else is discussing it either; at least, not where I can get at the conversations.
Yeah, judges are hard, and they are actually one of the more important things on the ballot.
We had something like 28 judges county wide, with most jurisdictions voting for a dozen or so. I had 14 on my ballot.
Our local NPR station held a series of debates/townhalls/roundtables, where the judges had a chance to talk about their positions, and others had a chance to ask them questions.
I listened in on, or read the transcript from (have forgotten which) something similar done around here, last time around.
The answers to such questions were all ‘sorry, I’m not allowed to talk about that.’
One thing you can do is look to see if there is any group or publication that endorses candidates in your area. You don’t have to go with these endorsements, but the editorial with the endorsements will likely have their reasoning why them make it. I was at a lost on an at large city council seat in DC, so I went with the person endorsed by an environmental group I like.
And if you are lazy and voting straight ticket, your party will be more than happy to provide you with a sample ballot.
At the polls yesterday, there were two booths set up in the parking lot, one for republicans and one for democrats, hawking their wares. Both attended by not a small number of people.
They were calling out that judges are not listed by party on the ballot, and so you would need their sample ballot if you hadn’t looked them up already.
I’m not a big fan of just following a sample ballot, but if I had forgotten to look up the judges before going down, such a thing may have been useful.
I’ve had a sample ballot for some time – got one from the county democrats by email, and I think had already gone to the county board of elections site and downloaded one there.
Judges are listed by party line in NY – though see above, my candidates are running on multiple party lines including even on both D and R at the same time. The party line is indeed a factor in my decisions, and this year it’s a large one; but if the Democrats have for whatever reason endorsed a total ass, I’d rather not vote for that ass in this particular race, which is 4-out-of-8 will win. It would be nice to be able to find out. – admittedly, I haven’t yet searched on each of them filtered for news sites yet; I can’t vote until the 24th anyway if I want the vote registered election night. But most years I can’t find much that way either, other than who they’ve been endorsed by, which is sometimes helpful.
In my corner of Miami-Dade County:
- President/Vice-President
- US Representative
- State Senator
- State Rep
- Clerk of the Circuit Court
- (6) Judicial Retentions
- Miami-Dade County Mayor
- School Board Member
- Village Vice-Mayor
- Village Council Member
- (6) Amendments to the State Constitution
- (3) County Referenda
- (7) Village Referenda
I always print out a sample ballot from the elections web site and do my research based off of that. I was surprised to find a few opinion pieces and news articles regarding the judicial retention vote. Referenda are a bit harder to find anything on, especially at the County and Village level.