Vote!
Election Day is tomorrow! If you're registered to vote, no matter whether it's locally or for an absentee ballot, be sure to vote. Remember that if more young people turn out to vote, more future politicians will target their issues toward young people.
Local elections may seem unimportant compared to the looming 2008 Presidential election, but I'd argue that it's the other way around. When your vote is one of thousands instead of one of millions, you have much more of an effect on the election. And many important issues are decided locally, not by the President, especially things that affect the environment and education. Gay rights and women's rights tend to be decided at the state level by your local representatives.
If you're in Cambridge, come up with a ranking order tonight for the City Council candidates (and the School Committee, if you're interested) and write it down so you can remember it at the poll tomorrow.
As a brief summary of how the ranking works, you start out supporting your #1 choice, and your vote moves down the list whenever it would be "wasted" otherwise. This can happen either if your choice is already going to be elected without the help of your vote, or if he or she is being eliminated from the runoff for having too few votes. Ultimately, your vote is only wasted if it falls off the end of the list, so longer preference orders are better.
A candidate gets elected if they get the support of 10% of the voters in this way. The votes of those 10% are then used up, having no further effect on the election. This leads to a slight bit of strategy: if you assume that the 8 incumbents will all be re-elected (a reasonable assumption), then you may want to make sure your vote doesn't get used up by an incumbent when it could be deciding which challenger gets the 9th seat. The strategy, then, is to rank all the challengers you support higher than incumbents.
My #1 choice will be Sam Seidel (the founder of the Progressive Democrats of Cambridge), because he has good plans for Cambridge and the experience in urban planning to actually make them work. The other challengers I support, getting my second and third place votes, are Jonathan Janik and Larry Ward.
Local elections may seem unimportant compared to the looming 2008 Presidential election, but I'd argue that it's the other way around. When your vote is one of thousands instead of one of millions, you have much more of an effect on the election. And many important issues are decided locally, not by the President, especially things that affect the environment and education. Gay rights and women's rights tend to be decided at the state level by your local representatives.
If you're in Cambridge, come up with a ranking order tonight for the City Council candidates (and the School Committee, if you're interested) and write it down so you can remember it at the poll tomorrow.
As a brief summary of how the ranking works, you start out supporting your #1 choice, and your vote moves down the list whenever it would be "wasted" otherwise. This can happen either if your choice is already going to be elected without the help of your vote, or if he or she is being eliminated from the runoff for having too few votes. Ultimately, your vote is only wasted if it falls off the end of the list, so longer preference orders are better.
A candidate gets elected if they get the support of 10% of the voters in this way. The votes of those 10% are then used up, having no further effect on the election. This leads to a slight bit of strategy: if you assume that the 8 incumbents will all be re-elected (a reasonable assumption), then you may want to make sure your vote doesn't get used up by an incumbent when it could be deciding which challenger gets the 9th seat. The strategy, then, is to rank all the challengers you support higher than incumbents.
My #1 choice will be Sam Seidel (the founder of the Progressive Democrats of Cambridge), because he has good plans for Cambridge and the experience in urban planning to actually make them work. The other challengers I support, getting my second and third place votes, are Jonathan Janik and Larry Ward.