What, that's it?
Yep, this year's primary is kinda quiet. The biggest ticket is US Rep for us up in the Panther Lake area, and we're looking for a replacement for County Assessor, as well as a slew of State Supreme Court candidates.
Here are my recommendations. You don't have to pay attention to them, and I encourage you to make your own decisions. One of the great advantages of mail-in ballots is that it gives you the chance to deliberate as opposed to being in a voting booth facing a bunch of strange names and no idea what to do.
There are whole slew of other people's endorsements and recommendations, but I recommend people start with the Voter's Guide, which allows the candidates to present themselves in their own words (or their approved words). Sometimes its a great place to see red flags, or to reveal their personal story or preferences. You want to see who is giving money to the various candidates? Check out the Public Disclosure Commission here.
The two big sets of media endorsements are:
The Stranger. which tends to be lefty loosie, swung more away from progressive candidates this time around. Their arguments can be a little loose, and they often do not get this far south of the city.
The Seattle Times goes a little more righty-tighty, but aims at centrist and pro-business. Oddly, they've currently got their recommendations behind a paywall, which is just dumb.
And I should note that here you can find a summary of the two major papers, with notes about where they agree with each other.
Other than that?
The Urbanist does a damned fine job summing up the races and covers a lot of the races that the mains don't deal with.
Washingtonsupremecourt.org does a great job summarizing the state of the state's supreme court,
The Fuse Progressive Voters Guide weighs in, giving their choices and why other candidates may not have made the cut. Here's the link for King County, but you can search around for other locations as well.
The Lefty Cheat Sheet does a good job gathering together all of the endorsements of the center-to-left crowd, for your viewing enjoyment.
The Sierra Club's notes are here. The state GOP talks about their chosen judges here. The King County Dems talk here.
And with all of that out of the way, here's what I put down. You can find my rationale and rationalizations in the earlier entries.
US Representative District 9: Adam Smith
State Representative, District 11: Ashley Fedan
King County Assessor: Robert Foxcurran
Washington State Supreme Court:
Position 1: Colleen Melody
Position 3: Mike Diaz
Position 5: Theo Angelis
Position 7: Debra Stephens
And that's it for me. The deadline is 4 August, and I strongly advise voting early because of all the craziness at the National Level. And if you no longer trust the post office, here is a link with your friendly neighborhood voting drop-offs.
OK, I went to all the trouble of providing all the links. Now go out there and vote!
More later,
