Election November 2020 Progressive Voter Action Guide
(Guía Progresiva de Votaciones Noviembre 2020)
The most important election in our lifetime.
It will be decided by mostly by turnout, but also by how much cheating and dirty tricks are prevented.
Young people, brown people, and democrats don't bother to vote as much as old, white, republicans. Besides voting yourself, broadcast the call for everyone you know to vote, donate to combat voter suppression, and take action for critical races around the country.
Every race matters. Republicans are using obscure offices like "secretary of state" to suppress voting, and to tilt the playing field to the rich, school boards to misinform children.
Focused on Santa Barbara, CA. You can figure out much about other local races by checking the sources.
Explanation is given only where the choice was not obvious, or the effect of particular interest.
On this page
VOTE-early in person, on election day, or drop your mail-in ballot in a drop box—due to messing with the USPS, it's too late now to mail it in.
- RIGHT NOW Confirm your voter registration is current—in California, or anywhere else in US. Not tomorrow…do this now, while there is capacity to process any changes.
- Sign up NOW for tracking your mail in ballot (link for California)
- VOTE—drop your mail in your ballot in an OFFICIAL drop box, or turn it in at a polling place—having your vote counted by election day, rather than after will help reduce chaos.
More info
- CA Voting Deadlines
Registration Deadline: October 19, 2020
Absentee Ballot Request Deadline: October 27, 2020
Absentee Ballot Return Deadline: November 3, 2020
Early voting: Varies by county
General Election: November 3, 2020 - A complete guide to how to vote, by mail or in person, early or on Election Day
- How to make sure your vote counts—The collision between the coronavirus pandemic and the 2020 elections means that voting is a far more complicated exercise this year. Americans who do not want to go in person to a polling place on Election Day need to learn their options for mail voting, which differ state to state. And President Trump’s recent attacks on the U.S. Postal Service have raised alarm among many voters about whether they can trust that their ballots will be counted if they put them in the mail.
- When mail in ballots are processed and counted, by state
- Are You an American Voting From Abroad? Here’s How to Do It—The pandemic has made it more complicated to vote from overseas this year, so it’s best to do it early. Voters from some states need to be extra careful.
Endorsements
Focused on Santa Barbara, CA. You can figure out much about other local races by checking the sources.
Explanation is given only where the choice was not obvious, or the effect of particular interest.
=President, Vice President=
- President, Vice President—Joeseph Biden+ Kamala Harris
=United States Representative=
- 24th district—Salud Carbajal
=State Senator=
- 19th district—S. Monique Limon
=State Assembly=
- 37th district—Steve Bennett
=Santa Barbara County Board of Education=
- Joe Howell
- Peter MacDougall
- Richard Fulton
- Roberta Heter
=Santa Barbara Community College District=
- Robert Miller
- Erin Guereña
- Anna Evertt
=Santa Barbara Unified School District; vote for three=
Governing board member
- Laura capps
- Wendy Sims Moten
- Virginai Alvarez
=Goleta Union School District Board of Education; vote for two=
- Sholeh Jahangir
- Vicki Ben-Yaacov
=Goleta Mayor=
- Paula Perotte
=Goleta City Council=
- Stuart Kadsin
- Kyle Richards
=Goleta WaterDistrict; vote for two=
- Lauren Hanson
- Farfalla Borah both endorsed by all the good peeps & orgs, including Meg West (former GWB member)
=Measures submitted to voters=
- NO Proposition 14; stem cell research
- YES Proposition 15
- YES Proposition 16
- YES Proposition 17
- YES Proposition 18
- NO Proposition 19
- NO Proposition 20
- NO Proposition 21—Supportive of the concept, but wary of unintended consequences, which are hard to avoid. See full notes below.
- NO Proposition 22
- NO Proposition 23—Dialysis No. Increases cost w/o benefit.
- YES Proposition 24—Yes...reluctantly.
- YES Proposition 25—eliminate cash bail. Puts rich and poor on more equail footing, provides for reducing discrimination based on race. NAACP blurb in ballot info is, sadly, paid for by bail bond industry.
- YES Measure M
- YES Measure L
sources and notes on on propositions below
Donate
Donate to progressive candidates as if your life depends on it. We’re going all out on donations this year. Make an account at Act Blue (links below) so you donate again and again with a few clicks, each time it sinks in deeper how mission-critical this election is. The number of people donating make a difference as well as the amount of $, so even if you have little $ these are worth supporting...in order of importance:
- Immediate impact—automatically prioritized to the closest races. This is the best single spot to donate at this late hour.
- Flip the Senate is an extremely important cause worth pouring funds into; supreme court confirmations, presidential oversight...not to mention legislation.
- Biden-Harris The presidency is also obviously key
- Donate to support Native American voting in North Dakota—the battle to win back the Senate may be decided in two majority Native American counties in North Dakota, where the State is going all out to suppress the Native vote
- Wisconsin democrats--a critical swing state
- Break the gerrymander!--if dems win state assemblies in this redistricting year...that will hep for the next ten years until the next census! If we'd been thinking as long term as the republicans we'd be in less trouble today...
- Hold the house!—We are unlikely to lose ground here, but still need to do the work
- Stop Trump’s Theft of the Electoral College Last week, Speaker Nancy Pelosi began mobilizing Democrats for the possibility that neither Joe Biden nor President Donald Trump will win an outright Electoral College victory, a once-in-a-century phenomenon that would send the fate of the presidency to the House of Representatives to decide. Under that scenario, every state’s delegation gets a single vote. Who receives that vote is determined by an internal tally of each lawmaker in the delegation. This means the presidency may not be decided by the party that controls the House itself but by the one that controls more state delegations in the chamber. And right now, Republicans control 26 delegations to Democrats’ 22, with Pennsylvania tied and Michigan a 7-6 plurality for Democrats, with a 14th seat held by independent Justin Amash. If Democrats can flip one congressional seat in Pennsylvania, Florida, and Montana, they can prevail over any attempt to undo the election results through subverting the Electoral College outcome.
House seats we need to flip to turn the PA, FL, and MT delegations BLUE:
Pennsylvania - 1st District, Democratic challenger, Christina Finello
Pennsylvania - 10th District, Democratic challenger, Eugene DePasquale
Florida - 15th District, Democratic challenger, Alan Cohn
Florida - 16th District, Democratic challenger, Margaret Good
Montana - One House seat, Democratic challenger, Kathleen Williams
Activism
- Contact everyone you know, and suggest they contact everyone they know,
- Find those few remaining voters and let them know—
- Drop off their ballot if they have not yet mailed it—too late for mail!
- They can check online if their vote has been recieved...if it has not they can vote with a provisional ballot
- If they are not registered they can still vote with a provisional ballot in some states if they are eligible
- Why they really, really should vote if they are not planning to— until they hear this is the one time in their life to try it out; they don't have to ever vote again if they don't like it
- Why Biden is actually good, beyond not being trump...see also phone bank info, below..
- espectially ones who may not have voted, and also suggest they contact all their friends, too. You may know someone who just turned 18, or 80, and is bewildered by the whole thing and may need just a little nudge to get them to the polls or to be inspired to vote for Biden, and down-ballot democrats (Note: Biden's policies are surprisingly progressive--article, podcast)
- Find those few remaining voters and let them know—
- Indivisible—Effective local actions around the country, e.g., protect the results
- Phone bank now through the election. Phone banking tutorial
- Wellness check
- Listen, don't interrupt
- Make empathic connection
- End on positve note
- Record notes/ outcome in phonebank software
Stay informed
- President Trump wants to undermine the election. Here’s one way to stop him
- What Really Scares Voting Experts About the Postal Service
- Republicans’ long-term vote heist matters more than Trump’s tantrum
- U.S. Postal Service Warns of Potential Mail-In Ballot Delays
- Trump Is Plotting Against the Census. Here’s Why
- How One Strategist Thinks Democrats Can Win in November
- Voting With Your Middle Finger: Two Views On The White Working Class—This is the best explanation yet for how the *%@# anyone could have voted for Trump. Listening to this made me a better person.
News is vital for democracy...subscribe to support reporting and research!
- New York Times, Washington Post—Middle (note: reality has a liberal bias)
- Rachel Maddow—Middle left
- Santa Barbara Independent—Local
- Democracy Now—Far left
After Election Day...in Case of an Illegal Attempt to Hold Power
Hold the Line: A Guide to Defending Democracy
Sources
I find the State voter guide pretty useless; it's just competitng sales pitches, which are often totally misleading. More instructive is who is supporting what, and why:
- SB indivisible
- SB Independent
- CA Sierra Club
- SB Democrats
- SF green party
- LA times
- Santa Barbara Progressive Coalition
- Progressive Voter's guide
-
OPPOSITE DAY:
Sometimes when it is confusing which way to vote, it can be helpful to see what the opposition is thinking. Here's evangelical Christian's recommendations, whcih are especially helpful for the judiciary:
http://www.electionforum.org/
https://conservativevoter.org/
http://www.christianvoterguide.com/
Prop 21-Rent control-No
Similar to the Independent; we are still absorbing the consequences of state rent control, lets see how that goes before tinkering more. Examples of unintended consequences of some of the the local rent control under discussion on our own efforts to be benign landlords:
- Limits to increasing rent: the only time we've ever increased rent on existing tenants in 30 years is when the state rent control went into effect. Why? the state rules prohibut landlords from catching up if landlords have way out of date, low rent. So, we raised everyone's rent to catch them up to inflation, and added automatic, annual increases to the rent, something we'd never done before, in order to preserve out ability to charge market rate rents in the future should we need to.
- Just cause eviction=lower willingness to take a chance on any marginal tenant (because you could be stuck with them) = greater difficultly for most at risk tenants to find housing. We rent mostly to people who don’t check the usual boxes and would have trouble getting most housing; we'd be much more reluctant to do this if we didn't have the option to ask someone who is not working out to leave.
- Per person relocation assistance= same problem as above plus much lower willingness to rent to more people per unit = much lower affordability. For example, we could rent a three bedroom to two rich people at 50% of their income, or (what we prefer, as supporters of affordable housing) to six people at 25% of their income for the same net profit. BUT, relocation would be $10k for the rich people, or $30,000 for the affordable people. Relocation assistance should be by the room, or the unit, not by person.
Prop 23-Dialysis-No
Why—Would make dialysis more expensive, harming patients, by requiring the unnecessary presence of a doctor at all hours. This is a second abuse of the proposition system to resolve the same labor dispute after a similar measure was rejected by voters two years ago.
How this is confounding for progressives: A powerful union supports this measure, as does the Democratic Party, which generally allies itself with unions. Usually we would vote with unions against corporations…but with this particular move it looks like it is the union which is more in the wrong, and that this measure would hurt people who need dialysis more than it would help.
Sources:
Editorial: Vote no on Prop. 23, a rehash of ugly labor dispute …
Proposition 23 is opposed by a long list of patient advocates, medical professionals and other civic groups; the only endorsements its proponents tout are those from the California Labor Federation and the California Democratic Party.
General information; support/ oppose/ funding from CalMatters
Prop 24-electronic privacy-Yes…reluctantly
Why—This flawed, messy proposition is a mixed bag of steps forward and backward. The main argument in favor of it is that it keeps the California data privacy law from being undermined while we’re working for a better solution (this law was barely saved last year). The $10M for enforcement could address a major limitation in the current system; almost complete lack of resources to pursue offenders. It is at least an attempt to beat back the incursions of powerful tech companies. Reasonable progressives could for sure disagree on this one.
Sources:
...You can’t understand Prop. 24 without first understanding how lame the CCPA turned out to be. The law was intended to give Californians the right to know what data businesses are collecting about them, to opt out of the sale of that data, and to make businesses delete the data they’ve already gathered. But those rights are mostly theoretical, thanks to a handful of missteps by the law’s drafters.
...The biggest disagreements over Prop. 24 are interpretive. The initiative comprises 52 pages of dense legal language, addressing highly technical concepts, with subsections and intricate cross-references that even experts admit they struggle to follow. That convoluted language has led to sharply different opinions about what the initiative would actually do—whether, in crucial respects, it would expand consumer privacy or restrict it.
...it makes enough changes to existing law (which stays in place if the proposition fails) that it could alter the balance of power with data-hungry corporations. There’s just little agreement on whether those changes are, added up, better for consumers or corporations — or just kind of a wash. And whatever California does on privacy could end up becoming a floor for data rights across the country, because it’s hard for companies to treat Californians differently.
The CPRA shows how messy privacy policy can become when advocates themselves can’t agree on how hard to push, or who gets to lead the charge. That should be a warning to other states considering privacy laws, as well as those hoping for a federal one.
...supporters say that if voters don’t approve Prop. 24, California’s privacy protections might not survive long enough for another measure to be put on the ballot.
...At its core, the dispute is a philosophical schism about whether control over personal data should be treated as a civil right or a property right. Opponents of Prop. 24 say treating data as a commodity creates a system where the poorest people cannot afford to opt out. However, Alastair Mactaggart and Yang argue that removing any monetary value associated with data could close the door to people eventually being compensated for use of their information. “This is why these companies are so valuable, because they know so much more about you than any entity, any government,” Mactaggart said. “There’s tremendous power in this data.” Yang has long pushed the concept of a “data dividend,” which would require tech companies to pay people for using their personal information. Prop. 24 leaves the pathway open for such a concept.
Why the EFF Doesn’t Support California Proposition 24—Electronic Frontier Foundation
EFF works across the country to enact and defend laws that empower technology users to control how businesses process their personal information. The bestconsumer data privacy laws require businesses to get consumers’ opt-in consent before processing their data; bar data processing except as necessary to give consumers what they asked for (often called “data minimization”); forbid “pay for privacy” schemes that pressure all consumers, and especially those with lower incomes, to surrender their privacy rights; and let consumers sue businesses that break these rules. In California, we’ve worked with other privacy advocates to try to pass these kinds of strengthening amendments to our existing California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA).
Prop 24 does not do enough to advance the data privacy of California consumers. It is a mixed bag of partial steps backwards and forwards. It includes some but not most of the strengthening amendments urged by privacy advocates.
Prop 25 (eliminating bail system) – Yes
Why—prop 25 is a step in the right direction, away from a system where you stay in jail while awaiting trial if poor, leave if rich. It would also get the corrosive influence of the bail industry out of the picture (see first article for an indictment of their sneaky tactics in opposition to prop 25, enlisting the head of the CA NAACP). While algorithms may not be bias-free, they are free of the guaranteed bias of cash bail, and are an easier target for improvement.
Sources
Read through the voter handbook for California’s November election, and a name pops up over and over again: Alice Huffman. As leader of the California NAACP, Huffman has weighed in with positions that critics say run counter to the historic civil rights organization’s mission to advance racial equality in education, housing and criminal justice…
...What the guide doesn’t tell voters is that Huffman’s political consulting firm has been paid more than $1.2 million so far this year by ballot measure campaigns that she or the California NAACP has endorsed. She’s been paid by campaigns funded by commercial property owners fighting the tax increase, corporate landlords opposed to expanding rent control and bail bondsmen who want to keep the cash bail system.
There is something repugnant, and corrosive to our collective notion of justice, about allowing people without money to stay locked up in jail while others, accused of the same crimes but with money to spend, can buy their way out. That’s bail in a nutshell. It’s a mechanism to divide the privileged from the punished in the earliest phase of a criminal proceeding, long before any judge or jury makes a finding of guilt or innocence. It is the ultimate insult to our justice system’s claim that all stand equal before the law, and that all are presumed innocent until proved guilty.
California has been trying to rid itself of money bail for decades, but every effort has been turned back by the bail bond industry and the insurance companies that support them.
...SB 10 and other laws adopted in its wake include processes for monitoring compliance, correcting problems and working out the kinks in the interests of justice. The mandate to analyze pretrial detention data will provide a long-overdue examination of California court operations and disparities among counties. Proposition 25 is an important step toward better justice.