Friday, October 16, 2020

340-plus pages of voting materials


We take voting VERY SERIOUSLY here in San Francisco, and in California.  

The SF voting handbook is more than 230 pages long this election; the state/county book is more than 110 pages long.  This extensive material is provided in part because our laws require that certain topics always be put in front of voters after the legislature and governor approve it, AND because we have a robust and popular initiative process, which allows proposed laws to be put to vote in November if supported by valid voter signatures on petitions.   (The signature requirements are based on a percentage of the population which varies depending on what we are trying to accomplish, say ~620k+ or ~990k+ signatures.  You can read about this on Wikipedia. ) 

We're a big state: WE DO THIS ALL THE TIME QUITE SUCCESSFULLY.

Yes, we have more than one election each year, so this isn't covering ALL of the decisions we needed to make in 2020.  

And yes, because we welcome people to become citizens from around the world, we offer ballots in many languages.  The handbook page shown excerpted above (upper right) finally tells me that the Southeast Asian script I didn't recognize in some of our official documents are in Khmer.  (That is SO COOL.)