The California Special Election happened yesterday. I started the day in San Diego, so I barely made it home in time to vote. It makes me sad that some of the most reasonable people I know (Kelly, Mom, Sarah) didn’t vote. I’m going to run through my vote on each just for future reference:

Prop 73

NO. While I believe that, in most circumstances, a girl ought to tell her parents that she is planning on having an abortion, I do not believe it is the State’s place to force that on us. I would never force someone to do it, so I believe we should not have a law for it. An interesting and frightening fact about 73 (which I didn’t learn about until after the vote) is that it also would have redefined abortion as the death of a child. I’m not sure what this would entail legally, but it appears to be a wedge driven in by the Pro-Life camp to make having an abortion more difficult and, in the future, possibly a criminal act. I’m glad this one didn’t pass, though the closeness of the vote has me worried.

Prop 74

YES. The effects of this one were vague to me, but my experience with the context of this proposition is that there are times when teachers ought to be fired. Often it is so difficult to fire them that nothing is done about it, leaving the school to work around the problem as best they can, but still subjecting students to the having a dismal sophomore year of English, for example. That this didn’t pass doesn’t really bother me too much - just as it is often too much work to remove a bad teacher, sometimes it is too much work to remove a bad policy.

Prop 75

YES. I don’t much care for unions, so this seemed like a good way to reign them in. That it didn’t pass doesn’t bother me, as I will most likely never be part of a union and I hope to never have to deal with one.

Prop 76

NO. Setting artificial spending limits like that sounds like a recipe for disaster. Make a budget based on your needs, not based on the last three years and blindly following it.

Prop 77

NO. Not sure what redistricting would do exactly, so status-quo seems okay.

Prop 78, 79

NO. My concern with both 78 and 79 was whether it would actually reduce state spending or not. One argument for it was that if people got medications, they would not simply not take them and then end up in the emergency room once they’ve gotten sick as a result. I can see this happening. Why I ultimately voted no is that I feel by giving reduced-price drugs we’re trying to patch a hole on another problem we created years before: public hospitals effectively can’t turn away patients, a policy that costs taxpayers huge amounts of money to care for those who can’t afford it. I’m glad neither passed, but I wonder about what the next attempt will be.

Prop 80

NO. The state hasn’t done anything recently to lead me to believe that it is better at regulating the electric industry than the market is. Therefore, I leave it in the hands of the market.

As most reports claim, I believe this was an election on issues that just weren’t on the minds of most Californians. We’ll see how it affects the governor’s popularity.