Well, I took a deep breath of relief last night. It turns out that every single one of Arnold's propositions bit the big one in the vote yesterday. For a while there, it looked like prop 75 was going to squeak by with just .5% over the "no" voters, but at last check at a bit past 2am PST, it's losing. Prop 73 also looked like a close call at last check, being voted down by 52.1% of the voters.
No matter what, this confirms two things that make me happy as a Californian and as an American.
1) Arnold doesn't have enough support in the state to do anything drastic. The state is a bit too close to being split down the middle for my tastes, but at least the side of logic and reason won this one.
2) It means that state votes aren't fixed--or at the very least that this one wasn't fixed enough. If you look at both the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections the margin of winning for Bush was so tiny that the election only needed to be fixed so that a small fraction of the votes had to be switched to him. The win was tight to make the election a less obvious, more subtle fix.
So, I say, keep voting in your state elections--it seems we just might still have control over them.
Check out the results yourself at http://vote2005.ss.ca.gov/Returns/prop/00.htm. Who knows? After this writing the results may have changed. I hope the win gets wider so I can be wrong about my ideas that the vote might have been fixed. Believe me--I want to be wrong.
Wow-- well, as of 7:30 this morning, it's an across-the-board "no." Ha ha, Arnold! =D
ReplyDeleteAs I mention in my post, some made it with tighter margins that I feel comfy with. I guess all of those "VOTE YES ON PROP XX" TV ads helped them out. Sheesh--these props were all fairly no-brainers. It's a shame more people couldn't get sick for a week and watch local programming about the props on C-SPAN and cable access like I did. :P
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