UNITED STATES SENATOR
A few months ago I went to Tiffany Smiley’s website to check her views on abortion rights and Donald Trump’s Big Lie. There was no info, so I emailed her asking if she supported a women’s right to choose and if she believed Joe Biden had beaten Donald Trump in the 2020 election. She never answered. I’ll take that as a “No” and a “No.”

VOTE PATTY MURRAY

UNITED STATES REPRESENTATIVE, CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT 7 
Cliff Moon calls himself a “normal American.” Cliff Moon thinks Trump might’ve won the 2020 election. Cliff Moon doesn’t think we need gun regulations. Cliff Moon wants to build a border wall. Sadly, Cliff Moon is a normal American.

VOTE PRAMILA JAYAPAL

ADVISORY VOTES NOS. 39 & 40
Advisory votes are stupid. They are only on the ballot because street urchin Tim Eyman sponsored an initiative back in 2007 that required advisory votes on tax increases that were not subject to citizen referendum.

These two pieces of legislation regard an increase on airplane fuel taxes and workers comp for gig drivers. They passed by a cumulative vote of 179-114 in the state house and senate, which in this country is a landslide. These bills are now law. Your vote means nothing. Don’t encourage Tim Eyman.

DON’T EVEN VOTE ON THESE

SECRETARY OF STATE
Last year Washington’s secretary of state Kim Wyman (the fourth consecutive Republican to hold the office) was appointed by Joe Biden to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, leaving her office vacant for Jay Inslee to appoint her replacement. Inslee appointed State Senator Steve Hobbs who now has the power of incumbency in this race and would be the first Democrat elected as secretary of state since 1960, when former jazz bandleader Victor Aloysius Meyers won reelection.

Hobbs’ opponent, Julie Anderson, is running as a member of the “Nonpartisan Party,” which isn’t really a party and (in these times) seems a little quaint...and maybe suspicious. In fact her focus on nonpartisanship borders on an obsession. As Texan columnist Jim Hightower once said, “There’s nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead armadillos.”

VOTE STEVE HOBBS

CHARTER AMENDMENT NO. 1, EVEN-NUMBERED ELECTION YEARS
FOR CERTAIN COUNTY OFFICES
Currently King County voters vote for the offices of executive, assessor, director of elections and county council in years ending in 1,3,5,7, and 9, when there’s not much else exciting on the ballot, which means a lot of people don’t bother to vote at all. Not voting in every election is lame. But so are many Americans. We shouldn’t have to do this, but moving elections for county offices to even-numbered years will increase turnout. That’s good. Too bad it’s necessary.

VOTE YES

PROPOSITION NO. 1, CONSERVATION FUTURES LEVY
This levy provides money to acquire and preserve green and open spaces within King County, spaces like the Sammamish River Trail and Duwamish Waterway. If you own a home assessed at $800,000, this will cost you $50 a year. This is a levy that’s been collected since 1982, but the rate it has been collected at has halved since that time, due to state limitations on property tax growth (ahem, Tim Eyman). A vote of approval would lift the levy lid to the percentage it was at in 1982.

The statement in opposition of this levy reads like an old man yelling at a cloud, with exclamation points and double spaces pointing to a Yahoo email account. Don’t listen to your crazy uncle.

VOTE APPROVED

PROSECUTING ATTORNEY
The Seattle Police Officer’s Guild is a cop frat house that believes shooting first and asking questions later is proper police procedure. I’m voting for the King County Prosecutor candidate NOT endorsed by those clowns.

VOTE LEESA MANION

JUSTICE POSITION NO. 1
The three Supreme Court positions up for election this year all have incumbent candidates who are running unopposed. I typically don’t vote for (or write about) candidates who are running unopposed, but I will make an exception for the candidate for this position because her name is Mary Yu and in 2012 she presided over the first same-sex wedding in the state of Washington. Marry me? Marry you!

VOTE MARY YU

PROPOSITIONS 1A & 1B
If Seattle had Approval Voting in the 2021 election, Ann Davison would not be our current city attorney. In that year’s primary, a liberal (Nicole Thomas-Kennedy), a conservative (Davison) and a moderate (Pete Holmes) faced off to see which two would advance to the general election. The liberal got 36% of the vote and the conservative got 33%, leaving the moderate out of the running with just 31%.

The liberals hated the conservative candidate and the conservatives hated the liberal candidate, and had voters been allowed to hedge their bet and vote for ANY AND ALL candidates they “approve of,” Pete Holmes would’ve been everyone’s other choice, meaning he would’ve actually won the primary, advanced to the general election and undoubtedly defeated whichever candidate he’d have faced.

Ranked Choice Voting would not likely have produced the same outcome, because Davison and Thomas-Kennedy would still have been the top choices on the most ballots, eliminating Holmes right away, and allowing the same two candidates to face each other in the general election.

Both Approval Voting and Ranked Choice Voting seem a little gimmicky, but sometimes gimmicks work, and this real-world example (keeping very flawed candidates like Ann Davison out of office) is enough for me to want to give it a try.

VOTE YES & VOTE PROPOSITION 1A

MUNICIPAL COURT JUDGE POSITION NO. 3
I often wonder why we, the uninformed masses who mostly don’t know the difference between the Bill of Rights and the Ten Commandments, are tasked to vote for judges. This race reinforces that question in my mind.

The incumbent judge seems fine. His challenger doesn’t like him. Both are endorsed by people I trust. Both bring unique personal perspectives to the job. What’s a layperson to do? I’m seeing no reason to vote out an incumbent judge for no good reason.

VOTE ADAM EISENBERG

MUNICIPAL COURT JUDGE POSITION NO. 7
I’m not really sure why Nyjat Rose-Akins is running against incumbent Judge Damon Shadid, who by all accounts seems like a solid jurist. Tellingly, she touts her endorsements by Christine Gregoire and Jenny Durkan, two of the most incompetent executives in recent local government. So maybe Rose-Akins’ judgment is not very good, which seems like a bad quality in a judge.

VOTE DAMON SHADID