The last national polls have been taken... and we have voted

Kathleen and I continued our tradition of sitting at a literal kitchen table to study our ballots, with the help of the "blue book" -- the state ballot information booklet. 

A few questions on the ballot were truly "kitchen table" issues, as the political cliche goes. But most of the items on the very extensive ballot seemed distant from our daily lives. That doesn't make them unimportant, necessarily, but we agreed that we mostly had not paid much attention to them.

It was very easy to choose the Democrat in the national and state races, but the judicial retention choices, and there were many, pushed us to the "judicial performance evaluations" in the booklet. I know almost nothing about how the evaluation panel works, but it appears it consists of six non-attorneys and five attorneys, appointed by the governor along with senate and house leaders (including from the minority). According to the report, everyone on the ballot is satisfactory. 

I suppose a person could register a general sense of frustration with, well, everything, by choosing NO for each judge, but we went with YES, perhaps reflecting a general sense of things being OK in Colorado and wanting to support an institution that we rarely come into contact with. 

The real test was running through the seven state constitutional amendments and the seven propositions. Each of these citizen or legislative-generated items was described in the blue book, and the booklet is a model of solid professional writing, I have to say. It is texty, but how could it not be? It does pull summaries of "what a yes vote means," and "what a no vote means." There are also clearly written pro and con arguments. 

We favored extending a property tax exemption for disabled veterans, even if their disability was not due to service injuries. Seems like the least we can do. 

We favored repealing somewhat archaic definition of marriage language lingering the in the state constitution and voted "yes" to including an explicit right to abortion in the state law. We did briefly discuss the futility of this should the nut cases take over and impose a national abortion ban despite polls saying that over 70 percent of Americans favor choice.

Speaking of choice, we voted NO on a proposed amendment to include an explicit right to school choice. This is clearly a subtle inroad into adding more money for non-public schools and Colorado already offers all sorts of options regarding school choice. 

Among the propositions, we favored increasing taxes on bullets and guns and increasing state support for local law enforcement. 

After seeing the chaos from urban voters choosing to reintroduce wolves to the state (over the objections of rural voters), we rejected a proposition to add more protections for bobcats and lynx... both of which are already protected by law. We said NO to allowing more non-veterinarians to act like, well, veterinarians. We decided that the lack of clear standards and educational programs for these "para-professionals" meant that this proposal is premature. Plus, we were losing focus at this point.

We voted no on a proposition to establish all-candidate primaries and ranked choice voting for some elections. The mechanics are quite complex and we would become a living experiment. We noted that Alaska is voting this time to retract their own ranked choice law. No one is quite certain how it would work, but the fact is that seven multi-millionaires are funding the campaign for this proposition. 

One thing I know for certain: when the stupidly rich get exercised about a law or regulation, I grab my wallet and begin from the position of "no way." The last thing I would ever want to do is be controversial (ha!) but it is becoming more and more clear that class now dominates our societal dysfunction. Race and gender are powerful, of course, but the more powerful motivators will always be money and power.

I dropped off our sealed ballots on Wednesday night and we both received our ballot trax notifications that our ballots have been counted. Kathleen kept time and we invested 48 minutes, plus all those hours of commercials that we couldn't always avoid, in the process. 

I guess it's acceptable to expect a Coloradan to invest a bit less than an hour as part of being a citizen, plus driving to the drop off box about four miles to the west. 

Later we watched the unmasking of a transvestite on "The Masked Singer," and that show took the same time as completing our ballots. We did not get a chance to vote for our favorite but we were fine with that. We do resent not being able to vote online for our favorite "stars" in Dancing With the Stars. Only those in the Eastern and Central time zones get that privilege because of, well, time zones. 

Results from those TV shows are instantaneous (and unregulated, I assumed). The Nov. 5 election may take days for results to be finalized, and then will come the inevitable legal challenges, no matter who "wins." Americans will whine. Patience is not a virtue these days.

But at least we were asked to weigh in on some important electoral issues.

All is not well among Florida student writers

Humans have an often-useful ability to quickly move on from disaster and pain and disappointment. We are a hopeful species.

But there are some times when our short attention span and indifference to history can keep us from engaging with the effects of those past disasters, pains, and disappointment. We don't want to wallow in that, of course.

This past week I was reminded of a somewhat unfocused theory that the pandemic has had a wide range of negative effects on current high school and college students. Those two years or so of fear and confusion and isolation -- and that includes the entire country -- hit me forcibly as I was reading 102 feature stories from Florida students for a contest.

In short, they were depressingly bad.

They were fine in terms of spelling and grammar. In fact, I could sense plenty of writing skills and a seriousness of purpose. 

What was missing was curiosity, storytelling, focus, sourcing, and any sense of what readers want and need. Well... that's quite a list. I was asked to choose ONE overall winner and each entry received short comments on weaknesses and strengths or suggestions. Each entry could earn up to 50 points within the state association rubric. 

I chose that winner, but not one entry even came close to qualifying for the highest awards, called the All-Florida. I haven't heard back from the organizers of the contest but assume there will be some online conversation about the scores. 

The hurricane and Milton's effects on power and general destruction from the storm likely will delay any reply. I wrote a long email explaining my choices and included my concern that the pandemic has limited student willingness to get away from their screens to observe and talk directly to sources out in "reality." 

I won't get into all the specifics, but instead of what we might call features, which focus on showing people in action and taking readers beyond the basic 5Ws and H facts, I saw internet research, personal commentaries, basic news stories, and, most glaringly, missed opportunities. I typed something like, "Great idea for a coverage topic, but..." dozens of times.

I ended my email to my Florida coordinator by adding that I suspect the pandemic also has affected the teacher advisers. It is hard for me to believe that fully engaged instructors would be OK with most of these contest entries. In fact, they likely would not do well in any classroom. They just didn't have much content and local readers must have found it very easy to skip over these stories.

The common denominator for great student journalism is the adviser and the standards and coaching that are shared with students who are not used to writing for a public.

My theory is that those teachers are so overwhelmed, so damaged, that they are settling for writing that is spelled right and in recognizable English. 

Until the teachers get it back together, what hope is there for young writers? 

On the other hand, it's Florida. Maybe all the time on the front lines of the culture wars has done what we feared: ruined public education in the state.