By Robert Haugh
Election week is almost over. The votes are still being counted, but thankfully, the political mailers have stopped.
49ers CEO Jed York and organized labor flooded Santa Clara mailboxes with campaign literature for the last month. They bombarded voters with television ads, too.
Time for Santa Clara News Online’s Best and Worst of the Week Awards.
The Good – Leg Drop Award
Postal workers delivered mountains of political mailers, day after day.
Neither rain, nor heat, nor negative political mailers could stop them.
The Bad – Jabroni Award
Gary Ferraris was backed by approximately $2 million in spending by the 49ers and labor – and he’s headed for a historic election loss.
He’s running fifth in a six-person race. Ouch.
So much money. So many mailers. So many TV ads. So few votes.
While I’m pleased to see that Santa Clara voters are smart enough to see past the glossy mailers and TV ads, I take no comfort in seeing that none of the mayoral candidates has captured more than 1/4 of the vote and the votes were split along neighborhood lines.
The 2017-2018 Charter Committee proposed ranked choice voting in recommending Measure A in order to avoid this decidedly anti-democratic possibility. The proponents of the CVRA lawsuit spent $50,000 to oppose the Charter Amendment because it would have ended their lawsuit and their ticket to attorneys’ fees. How ironic that these people who promoted their lawsuit as providing greater access to democracy has resulted in the probability that the next mayor of Santa Clara will have been chosen by less than 30% of the voters. It’s also very ironic that many of the promoters of the lawsuit couched their arguments as providing a better chance at representation for underrepresented minorities. But in this election many of the same proponents supported a $700K campaign against a Latina candidate who was seeking to represent District 2’s Latino population.