Posts related to Voting

2022 February Election SF voter guide

San Francisco is having a special election on February 15 for the School Board Recall (aka Board of Education Recall), Assembly District 17, and San Francisco Assessor-Recorder.

If you’re a pissed off voter and want to vote for change, you have to vote for it. Don’t vote for the same people we’ve been electing for decades, vote against the incumbents and for newcomers and political outsiders.

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2021 ADEM Election step-by-step guide

Voting in the ADEM election will let you amplify your vote power by 100x. ADEM sets the direction of the Democratic Party and controls who earns the Democratic Party endorsement for State Assembly, State Senate, US House, and US Senate.

Voters trust and vote with the Democratic Party endorsements. The endorsements can easily create a 12% vote margin (about 62,000 votes) in these high-stakes elections that determine state and national policy.

You must register for ADEMs by January 11, 2021, and some of the prerequisite steps can take several days, so DO THIS NOW!

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November 2019 San Francisco Voting Guide

I will use my San Francisco Voting Framework to give you recommendations for the November 2019 election. The numbers in (parenthesis) are the voting principles I’m applying to my endorsement.

If you think we need this kind of rigorous analysis in the Democratic Party, then please support me: Steven Buss for Democratic County Central Committee.

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San Francisco Voter Framework

I have a general voting framework for ballot props which works most of the time. I’ve developed this framework over several elections and it is now fairly stable:

  1. Prefer to vote for new taxes, preferably without a set-aside
  2. Vote for groups that don’t have a strong lobby (youth, disabled, homeless, low-income people, the environment)
  3. Vote for social policy change in ways that agree with my values
  4. Vote for things that price externalities
  5. Vote against things which increase needless or unhelpful bureaucracy
  6. Vote against things which infringe upon rights of the people
  7. Vote against things which undermine good government
  8. Generally vote against budget set-asides, which limit the ability of representatives to budget effectively
  9. Vote to liberate funds from budget set-asides, to be useful for other purposes (new this election)
  10. Vote to fund infrastructure (new this election)

Don’t just vote NO on every ballot initiative. California’s broken tax system requires that way too many things go to the ballot because the legislature doesn’t have the constitutional authority to pass certain taxes and other laws. Voting NO for everything based on a principle of “we shouldn’t have to vote on so much” ensures the state is poorly run. My long term strategy with much of my political activism is to undo these rules and to bring California back to full representative democracy where ballot initiatives are rare.

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2018 November General Election Voting Guide

This is my longest-ever voter guide. Not only do I justify my positions on propositions using my voting framework, I explain those choices in depth. Every ballot prop position is justified by some of my 10 voting principles, eg if you see (1, !2) that means the prop satisfies voting principle 1 and undermines principle 2. Here’s the tl;dr, scroll down for detailed explanations.

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2018 June Election Voting Guide

I have a general voting strategy for props which works most of the time time:

  1. Prefer to vote for new taxes, preferably without a set-aside
  2. Vote for groups that don’t have a strong lobby (youth, disabled, homeless, low-income people, the environment)
  3. Vote for social policy change in ways that agree with my values
  4. Vote for things that price externalities
  5. Vote against things which increase needless or unhelpful bureaucracy
  6. Vote against things which infringe upon rights of the people
  7. Vote against things which undermine good government
  8. Generally vote against budget set-asides, which limit the ability of representatives to budget effectively

Don’t just vote NO on every ballot initiative. Here’s a justification for my YES and NO votes that fit within a general voting strategy. Feel free to share and/or print this out for election day.

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2016 November General Election Voting Guide

I had previously only posted this on Facebook, but since I’m planning to do this for every election going forward I moved it here.

Don’t just vote NO on every ballot initiative. Here’s a justification for my YES votes that fit within a general voting strategy. Feel free to share and/or print this out for election day.

My voting strategy is:

(1) prefer to vote for new taxes, preferably without a set-aside,
(2) vote for groups that don’t have a strong lobby (youth, disabled, homeless, low-income people),
(3) vote for social policy change in ways that agree with my values,
(4) vote for things that price externalities.

And I try to vote no for everything that doesn’t meet those criteria and/or increases needless or unhelpful bureaucracy (5), or infringes upon rights (6).

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