Why are things like this even elected offices? They should be appointed by the governor and confirmed by the state legislature or something. Anyway, four candidates:

• Sam Reed (Prefers Republican Party): This is the incumbent. He has been Secretary of State since 2001. “Throughout his eight years in office, Sam led major election reforms: Consolidating 39 separate county registration systems into one statewide database to remove duplicate voters, felons, and deceased voters; moving the primary to August so those overseas can receive their ballots in a timely manner; ending ballot enhancements; and auditing county election departments. Sam kept fighting for your right to vote without being restricted to a party, and was ultimately supported by the U.S. Supreme Court. Thanks to Sam, you can now go online to register to vote, start a business, or research your family genealogy. He saved and enhanced Washington’s oldest institution, the State Library, and he started the nation’s first state digital archive.” He was a major proponent of the top two primary. I may have to vote for him just for that.
• Mark Greene (Prefers Party of Commons Party): He likes the top 2 primary. He is a representative of a party that is “economically progressive, culturally traditional” which is just about the opposite of me (economically conservative, socially liberal). So no.
• Jason Osgood (Prefers Democratic Party): He is against flawed electronic voting machines and some voter privacy violations and some other things that he says Reed is for. This might be good. I am wary of those things too. There are some places I found that says he is against the top two thing too. I can’t verify that in my quick searching. He is also against all-mail voting. I like the idea of all mail voting. I’ll pass on him due to these two items.
• Marilyn Montgomery (Prefers Constitution Party): She is an advocate of equal ballot access laws (to stop the extra roadblocks to third parties). I am generally in favor of this. There doesn’t seem to be a lot more here though, and it isn’t quite enough to convince me.

So my vote is:

Sam Reed

And now lunch is over and I need to run to a meeting. More when I leave work in a few more hours.

OK, here I find myself on election day and almost out of time. I of course intended to space out all these ballot items and have plenty of time left. But in fact, I have about 45 minutes right now before I need to get on the road for work, and then maybe I have some time at lunch. But basically, I am going to crunch through as many of these as I can, and will probably spend less time researching, and less time talking about my choices. Oh well.

In any case, the next item on the agenda is the primary for my Representative for Congress. Now, this is a good time to mention that as of this election, Washington State has a “Top Two Primary” where all candidates (regardless of party) appear on the same ballot, then the top two end up on the ballot in November. This was very controversial, but I like it.

For this spot there are five candidates:

• Boleshaw Orlini (States No Party Preference): He says in his little summary paragraph that he was inspired by Ron Paul, but provides no details, and has no website. Fail.
• Richard Todd (States No Party Preference): Seems to basically be running promoting the need to be independent of parties. I like that idea, but the website is painful and the little of it I read did not impress me.
• James Vaughn (Prefers Democratic Party): I was actually tempted by this guy. I really want to vote for someone other than the two front runners here. And some of the policy statements this guy makes on his site I completely agreed on. But then there were others I just did not like one tiny bit. In the end, I won’t make that jump.
• Dave Reichert (Prefers Republican Party): This is the incumbent. It was interesting noting what major issues were completely absent from his website (Iraq). In general, I would not be automatically opposed to voting for a Republican. And if Obama ends up winning in November, I actually would prefer a Republican congress for balance. However, I can not in good conscience vote for any incumbent congress person who has not been a extremely vocal critic of this administrations overreaches. And I have heard no such thing about Reichert.
• Keith Arnold (Prefers Democratic Party): His main emphasis seems to be on the need to eliminate the US Supreme Court. Nuff Said.
• Darcy Burner (Prefers Democratic Party): I saw her in person a couple of times when I was doing the local Obama Delegate thing. She seemed nice, but I was really turned off by how partisan she was at those events. Meaning how much she talked about how bad the Republicans were and how we needed Democrats in office. Now, she did talk about issues too. But the emphasis on partisanship turned me off a lot. Having said that, she did actually seem to be somewhat reasonable on many of the issues. And although I am not super excited by her, she seems like the best of this bunch.

So, my vote:

Darcy Burner