What if you held an election and nobody came?

Did you vote this past Tuesday? I did, and I’m feeling pretty virtuous after looking up the info on our recent primary election here in California this morning. This came about after reading a Salon article that talked about the clueless statements made by Carla Fiorina and other primary election campaign embarrassments. I found out that voter turnout in California this past week was the lowest in 96 years – since 1914 (less than 26%)!! Admittedly it wasn’t much of a choice if you were voting Democrat as most of the major office candidates were running unopposed, or close to it. But there were some propositions on the ballot, and many judges to choose. Hey folks, get off your butts next time and make the (very small) effort to cast your vote! Otherwise we could end up getting some Hollywood actor as our governor. 🙂

On a related note, I also read the following shocking statistics: PG&E spent $46 million to convince voter to vote yes on Prop 16!! (It failed.) Meg Whitman spent $90 per vote in the primary (for a total of $80 million) versus Jerry Brown’s 20 CENTS (thanks Calbuzz for the info).

Hey, here’s an idea!! What if all of the big spenders took all of the money they throw away so casually on stupid campaign propaganda and contributed it all to a fund to pay down California’s deficit (currently in the $20 billion neighborhood)? Okay, even if you combine all of the spending (somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million) that would make only a dent – but maybe some teachers could get their jobs back, some libraries could stay open, some highways could get repaved.

Just saying.

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