I’m just curious what degree of research people here do on the candidates before voting. What is your process?
We had 26 races this year and I researched every candidate (except Republicans running against Democrats.) That means all ten candidates for every school board election, all the justices, all the local officials, etc. It took a couple days to see what the various responses to policy issues were. (I used the voter 411 site.) For those who didn’t have responses on the 411 site, I pieced together some mail clippings that interviewed our local candidates, and combined that with Google search to check out their website. I also checked to see if any candidates had been involved in scandals or had been involved in any newsworthy decisions. If I couldn’t find information about them online, I did not vote for them.
Historically my husband did the research for both of us, but this year was my turn, and boy was it a bit of a grind. I can’t say I enjoyed it.
I don’t know if this is going overboard, or what’s typical. I’m curious to learn how others do it.
I don’t research those I know, which the year were things like Governor, Congress person, State AG and even Insurance Commissioner. I did research “Lands Commissioner” or whatever it’s called, as well as the Superintend of Public Education. For state reps, I just voted party line. I figured if anyone was really undeserving I would have heard about. I didn’t vote for any of the local Port Commissioners candidates because I truly don’t care enough to research, and didn’t want to vote for some crazy.
ETA: I knew who to vote for in all judicial races, but I definitely would have researched that if I had any questions.
We usually have fewer contested elections than you are describing. If it’s some minor position, and I don’t know who to vote for, I sometimes leave it blank–especially if it’s uncontested. But I make a good-faith effort to peek at most of the candidates. Our local League of Women Voters usually does a “meet the candidate” thing, where all the minor local people get a chance to speak, and I usually attend that. The Zoom version this year was excellent.
Oregon makes it really easy for us with a comprehensive voter pamphlet that has candidate statements and pro/con statements on ballot initiatives. Even if I’m not up on what’s gonna be on the ballot (and I pretty much always am) I can spend a couple days going through the pamphlet, batting it back and forth with others on the Portland and Oregon subreddits and arguing with friends and family over it all.
All the way up until 2016, I did no research at all. I voted straight-ticket Republican, never gave it a thought.
2016 was when I became a third-party voter. I looked around and decided to go with Evan McMullin.
In 2018 I still voted a straight-red ticket for the midterms - Ted Cruz for Senate here in Texas, etc. But this year, I am planning to go both third-party for president and Senate (maybe Brian Carroll for president, Libertarian for Senate rather than John Cornyn). I would have voted for Jo Jurgensen, Libertarian for president, but don’t like her anti-Israel stance.
I have never bothered doing research for the lower-level things like county commissioner or school board.
It is the local stuff that is more important to take a look at.
The big stuff, president, federal offices, and all are pretty easy to form an opinion on. You will be inundated with information about them all throughout the election cycle.
The smaller stuff, however, is where it actually affects your life. If Trump is re-elected, I may be annoyed, but it won’t have nearly the effect on me as the mayor of my city.
We had a whole bunch of judges that are up this election. Those are the first contact many of my neighbors will have with the justice system.
No school board this year, but that is one that I research the most heavily. I pay more in taxes towards my local school than I do to nearly anything else, and I would like to make sure that money is spent wisely. I would like to make sure that my neighborhood’s families and children are well taken care of, and of course, good schools means a good property value.
The little stuff is what is most important to your personal life, and it is what you have the most influence over. My position has always been that you should go to vote locally, and while you are there, you may as well make your opinion known on the bigger stuff as well.
I have been doing research for elections since we moved to AZ and are doing mail-in ballots. I can sit with my ballot next to me at the computer and look up what I need to know as I read through it. For partisan elections I vote for the Democratic candidates. In the absence of any scandal I can predict with high certainty that I will agree with them over the Republican candidates.
Non-partisan elections I look at candidate statements or news stories. For example, for Community College Board I voted for the candidate who had taught at and run (as president or provost) community colleges for the past 40+ years vs. the cosmetology instructor who was fired from her teaching position. Last election we needed to vote for the board which oversees the water planning for the county, including the Central Arizona Project (canal bringing Colorado River water). Took a while to research that one, something like 15 candidates for six positions.
For propositions the county provides a guide which has all the propositions (state, county, and local) with the wording clarified (i.e., “Voting YES means…” and “Voting NO means…”). Usually pretty easy choices.
There are 20-30 judicial positions where the vote is retain or get rid of. For those I look at the scoring from the Arizona Bar Association.
When we lived in PA it was pretty much punch the big “D” button (there were no non-partisan races) and try to figure out the wording on any propositions while I am in the booth.
So a big +1 for mail in voting wrt having a better chance to be an informed voter.
That is pretty close to typical for me. I suspect it is pretty atypical based on reactions I have had.
I tend to cheat a bit on what I call functional offices like Sheriff, Drains Commissioner, Clerk, etc. If there is an incumbent I check for major issues with their performance. If they are doing okay, or better, the challenger gets a cursory look to see if there is an argument for being significantly better. If there is not, it ends there. Change is costly. I weight experience pretty heavily in my criteria for these offices.
I do spend a lot of time early ruminating over my evaluation criteria and their weighting for a given race. I do not go to the depths that the retired Army officer in me would be comfortable putting on a Powerpoint slide and briefing to my commander. Still those criteria shift depending on what is going on. They also vary based on which race I am voting on. That takes most of my early campaign focus. Before I can decide on a candidate I need to decide on what I want the next person in a given office to focus on.
For California’s ballot propositions, I open the official voter guide, and go to the “Rebuttal to Argument Agaiinst Proposition ___” for each one.
If the rebuttal to the argument against the proposition actually addresses the points made by the argument against the proposition, then I’ll probably vote Yes.
If, however, the rebuttal to the argument against the proposition ignores the argument against, and just repeats the same points made in the argument FOR the proposition, this tells me that the proposition’s proponents are trying to whitewash their arguments and bury the dissenters, so I’m almost certainly going to vote NO.
We had a weird proposition this year where the answer was not immediately obvious. It had to do with funds allocated for environmental projects and it wouldn’t go into effect until 2050. And even the environmental groups were split on it. In the end I voted against it, on the advice of the Sierra Club, but it definitely made me wonder “should I be voting on this?”
I do this. I also have access to a “guru,” someone whose values are the same as mine, and who knows the candidates and races in far more detail than I do. A professional, an actual “pol.” But I do my own research too, just to calibrate what my guru advises.
For me the partisan offices were easy: Ds all the way down but for two offices (Justice of the Peace and Constable) which were Republicans running unopposed. Those I left blank.
There were a bunch of judges to affirm from the Supreme Court on down. The voter’s literature included ratings by a 33-member commission, lawyers, and witnesses/litigants, all separated out covering several different areas. All the ratings were in the 90s with two getting several 80s and one a 75 in Comport. Those three I voted No, the rest Yes.
The propositions I read the arguments for and against. One bond issue had no ‘against’ arguments at all so that was easy and another, all of the ‘against’ arguments were either by the Arizona Free Enterprise Club or sponsored by them. After looking up the club’s website I voted Yes.
This left the county community college trustee board and Mesa K - 12 school board positions. The former was easy – I went for relevant experience, but the latter was a puzzle. There were five candidates for three positions and the hot button was sex-ed. The state has been pushing for for CSE – Comprehensive Sexuality Education – over absinance-only programs. Four of the five candidates said they were against CSE and preferred the current MESA – Mesa’s Education in Sexual Awareness – program instead. Conveniently, when I went to the Mesa schools’ site to find out what the syllabus was, I got a 404 error.
The fifth candidate did not say anything either way. Her I voted for, the other four I left blank.
For partisan offices, my research has already been done - Republicans are so bigoted, so corrupt, and so opposed to both science and fair elections that I can’t in good conscience vote for anything but Democrats. For the two non-partisan elections (school board and soil and water conservation) I used the recommendation of a single magazine, but it didn’t really take much research to decide. On the school board, the more conservative person wasn’t aware of a huge court decision about the state’s obligation to provide education to all children, which is enough for me (it’s a landmark case that affects school funding and allocation across the state). I did look further at him just now, and he also endorses keeping police in schools, the blatantly racist practice of suspending non-white students at higher rates, the blatantly racist practice of treating behavior as criminal from non-white students but not white students. The conservation board one was a little more varied, and I went with the moderately more ‘green’ and more active of the two candidates that appealed to me.
Back before the modern Republican party had fully metastasized, and when I am looking at primaries, what I’d do is check the endorsements from a variety of local newspapers and magazines. While they wouldn’t all agree on who to endorse, the endorsements all say something about why they picked a particular candidate, which paints a pretty good picture of them overall. I also look at their published platform (if someone doesn’t have a website and they’re running for a state or national office, they’re not worth bothering with), and at ballotpedia and similar sites (in the old days, newspaper voting guides served a similar function) to get an idea of their overall platform.
I generally sit down with my ballot and go through each item and look up the ones I’m unfamiliar with. So I don’t need to looks up the president or senators but state congressmen senators on down get looked up.
Even this year I voted for one republican and two libertarians while the rest were dems.
For the judges I look up the published evaluations and generally vote to keep them. There was one appeals court Judge that had some drama this year but it seemed more like sour grapes so I voted to keep them while there was another that only had 77% approval from the lawyers that appeared in front of him this I voted to drop.
For the ballot issues I read the pros and cons in several places to make sure I’m not missing any nuance. Like this year there there was a measure to equalize the sin tax on vaping with other tobacco products and then use the increased money for preschool. On the third article I read I found that the equalizing was also increasing the tax on all types of tobacco then bringing vaping up to the new higher level. I don’t like sin taxes in general and by sneaking in an overall sin tax increase they passed me off so I voted against it. If we’re going to do sin taxes we shouldn’t play favorites so I was generally for the measure to equalize all tobacco taxes before I did my research.
This was the first year we didn’t even bother researching the Republicans. If someone’s Republican platform includes anything other than frequent, vocal criticism of Donald Trump, I’m not interested. I did take a look at other candidates running for other parties. I mean it’s extremely unlikely I’ll ever vote Libertarian, but I feel like I must consider each candidate fairly.
I also researched the Republicans running unopposed in my local elections, but they were awful. Just awful.
At this point, the burden of proof is on Libertarians for me. Their national platform is ‘90% of the bad stuff Trump is doing, but worse, and a bunch of wishful thinking’, they almost had Vermin Supreme as their Presidential candidate (and do have ‘Vermin Supreme’s usual VP’ as their VP candidate), and every time I’ve put in the effort to look deeper, they look worse. Their local candidates are either ‘Republicans who like weed’ or completely clueless. I remember back when the Libertarians first made a big push to have a candidate for every election, I asked a local Libertarian candidate who was running for the soil and water conservation board what they would do differently from the others, since a conservation board is kind of an unusual position for a Lib. All they’d say was ‘if elected, I would make decisions consistent with a Libertarian philosophy’ - they couldn’t give any real answer to the most softball question it’s possible to ask a candidate!
There seem to be two strains of Libertarianism that I can tell. There are people who would be Republicans (for fiscal reasons) if the Republicans weren’t bonkers, and they seem reasonable to me. At least we can agree on social issues. Then there are the absolutely insane Ayn Rand-worshipping “taxes are theft” social darwinist nutjobs, and it seems to me that the ones running for office usually fall into the latter category. So yes, I am probably wasting my time.