On Elections
I really hate this time of year. Election Day always seems to land on or near my birthday, and it’s definitely one present I’d love to politely decline.
I hate that campaigns can buy lists with your phone number on them and suddenly you’re getting an influx of bullshit texts you never signed up for. I do my part by immediately reporting them as spam. I get that they’re trying to reach voters, but I don’t know how anyone decided the best time to ask a stranger for a favor is right after giving them a new reason to dislike you. They get so annoying that I will actually vote against them, even when I agree with them, out of pure spite. This is the way.
I don’t know how any particular campaign got my number. But California’s rules on who can access voter registration information say the file can include your phone number if it’s in your record, and election campaigning is one of the permitted uses. There are also companies that sell voter lists with cell phone numbers. The FCC’s guide says campaigns need your permission to text your cell using an autodialer, but they can send a text manually without it. There needs to be a “no solicitors” sign but when people try to text you and it gets rejected.
If I get a text from you trying to get me to vote for you, I will probably vote against you even if I agree with you. I know that makes me sound like a shitty voter. I am telling you how much I hate the texts.
I’m just here for my dog
The other thing about the weeks leading up to an election is that people start telling you how they vote. Most of the year we can all respect the little rule about religion, politics, and money. Then a ballot shows up in the mail and suddenly a conversation you thought was about your dog’s physical therapy takes a turn.
I took my dog to physical therapy and could tell the PT aide was inching the conversation toward politics and the upcoming ballot. I wouldn’t take the bait. She brought it up anyway. And I’m stuck, because I was feeding my dog peanut butter while he was in the water treadmill. The dog, for his part, kept his views to himself.
I can’t really blame her. The texts, the ads, the mailers. You spend a few weeks getting reminded of all the ways you’re getting fucked and your options are either: water or latex-based lube.
There is no third option.
What the fuck does “yes” mean?
I still fill out my ballot and try to take it seriously. Which is exactly how I end up spending an evening reading a ballot measure until I turn into a conspiracy theorist. This is what election cycles do to me.
I like to think I’m decently educated. But sometimes I read one of these descriptions and cannot for the life of me figure out what the fuck a “Yes” vote does. So I read the “No” explanation, hoping it’ll tell me what I just read in reverse. Then I go back to the top because now I’m less sure than when I started. Even the various apps and AI summaries can help but the problem is in the ridiculous wording in the props. Not even GPT 6 Astra could figure it out.
Take California’s Proposition 34 from 2024. It was about how certain health care providers could spend money from a federal drug discount program. To find out what “certain” was doing in that sentence, you had to get into the state legislative analyst’s explanation. Among the criteria: the provider had spent more than $100 million on things other than direct patient care over a ten-year period, and it owned and operated, or used to own and operate, multifamily housing with at least 500 violations rated high severity. So you start out reading about prescription drugs and somehow, by the end of the sentence, you need to know how many housing violations a health care provider has.
My friends in Nevada said their ballots were incredibly easy to understand. I can see why they’d say that. Nevada’s Question 5 that same year was about exempting child and adult diapers from certain sales and use taxes. Yes: take those taxes off diapers. No: keep them.
I have worked in Clinical Research for 10 years and one of the fundamental principles is informed consent for study participants. The forms they sign when they agree to participate must be written in 8th grade language.
I (obviously) can’t prove anyone made the California one hard to understand on purpose but I 100% believe it, because I cannot fathom any other logical reason how dozens of people could write and approve that language, unless it was to intentionally confuse you. And that’s what election season does to me after reading the same paragraph four times and I feel like I’m back in 9th grade English (which I failed and had to take summer school for) all over again.
Who paid for the ad?
And then there’s the money. I think of it as Russian nesting dolls of super PACs. A federal super PAC can take unlimited contributions from sources like individuals, corporations, and unions, but it spends independently and can’t give the money directly to a federal candidate or coordinate an ad with them. It has to report contributions and spending. But if the name on the report is a nonprofit, the nonprofit’s public tax return generally doesn’t have to name its donors. Depending on the money and how it was given, I can find out who wrote the check to the super PAC and still have no idea who put the money in that organization in the first place.
I’m an expert at ignoring politics the rest of the year because nothing good can come from always knowing what’s going on, in a world entirely out of my control. There’s a study of posts by politicians and news outlets on Facebook and Twitter that found posts about the opposing political group got shared about twice as often as posts about their own. I’m obviously speculating, but it feels like if you happen to be good at pissing people off, you might get asked to do it again tomorrow.
Politics basically feels like “the real housewives” for people who read newspapers. I’m still not totally convinced side A is all that different from side B when the cameras are off. It feels like scripted reality TV, and I can picture them waiting until the cameras are off to have a laugh, say “good game,” split the profits, and come back next season to fight about something neither of them was even mad about until somebody put a mic on them.
Anyway. The holidays are coming.
— Edgar
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