I just got back from exercising my right to vote for municipal representation. It was a case of trying to find candidates who didn’t copy one another’s homework (and campaign promises).
In municipal elections in Ontario, party affiliations aren’t shown on the ballot, but given the claims I saw in most of the pamphlets and local newspaper articles, almost all of our local candidates are fully paid-up members of the Green party. I don’t know why our school trustees need to be so concerned with things well outside the municipal level of responsibility, but I’d kinda prefer they concentrated on, y’know, the fricking schools in the region, rather than deforestation in the tropics, CO2 emissions, and banning plastic bags.
I ended up not using all my votes, as I couldn’t find candidates for some of the positions who didn’t seem to want to spend all their time stuffing envelopes for Greenpeace rather than running the town and regional governments.
Oh, and a protip for future candidates, especially if you’re late entering the race: not having a website means I can’t look up your positions on anything, and I’m not going to vote for you just on the basis of you having an interesting name.
I’ve gone for the write-in candidates in my area:
Mayor: Lord Voldemort
Councillor: Severus Snape
Regional Councillor: Xenophilius Lovegood
School Trustee: Dolores Umbridge
Comment by Lickmuffin — October 25, 2010 @ 19:07
When it comes to school trustees and positions where I do not have a dog in the fight, then I absolutely do choose them on the basis of an interesting name. The trustee I ended up voting for is definitely a Greenpeace envelope-stuffer, but her name was close enough to “Douchebag” and I could not resist.
Comment by Chris Taylor — October 25, 2010 @ 21:43
Hey, I can’t view your site properly within Opera, I actually hope you look into fixing this.
Comment by aparadekto — October 28, 2010 @ 02:13
I tried using the latest version of Opera and didn’t notice any problem. Could you be more specific about the problem you encountered?
Comment by Nicholas — October 28, 2010 @ 07:09