In the meantime I've been reading up on Publius about the issues;
2: No. See
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tlatoani's post.1 & 4: No. I don't like the idea of a constitutional amendment to fix these issues, and am not sure it'll even be effective at fixing the problems.
5: I'm a dad. Duh.
3: I an't a birder, ain't a hunter. I could care less, so I'm voting no, they supposedly made the law for a good reason.
Judges: The ACLU picks are Jane Beckering & Michael Cavanagh -- I'm going with them.
Otherwise a straight dem ticket. Anything else I should be aware of?
BTW there also the more up to date http:/michigan.gov/vote for checking for your if you're registered and polling place, but less info on the candidates/issues.
Oh, and I'll be voting on a Diebold "Accu" Vote, wonderful. Should I bring along my virus scanner?
[update] It turned out not to be a Diebold, but paper ballots. Yay. I asked a worker and she said they only had one for special needs folks and it broke down a 1/2 hour afre the polls opened. Heh.
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Not necessarily. I'm hearing people involved in education (i.e. teachers or former teachers) saying that this actually isn't going to be effective, and could in fact hurt the kind of school funding you probably care about. To the extent that it helps, it's going to help very indirectly -- by funding teacher pensions, not by providing dollars for the classroom. I voted No. (And yeah, I'm childfree, but it would arguably help my employer... except even my employer isn't sure it's beneficial.)
I did vote Yes on 4; anything that hamstrings eminent domain is good with me.
I asked who's responsible for escorting the data cards to get tallied into GEMS and the election worker worker looked at me like I was an alien, and said nothing get's taken out of the machine.
I suppose I could have pressed the issue more, but I know the local election workers somewhat, they're my neighbors and I felt bad putting them on the spot.
I'm sure most of the Diebold Accuvote equipment is going to work fine. It's just a few key polling places where they need to be tampered with to throw an election, and I doubt my poll is one of them.
In the past eminent domain was supposed to be there to allow public works, like highways and government projects, but in the past few decades it's been used more and more by big businesses to acquire, through government help, propoerties to build shopping centers and whatnot. There are too many cases of government teaming up with big business to take away property that then goes to private businesses. Poletown in Detroit is the classic case. Detroit condemned a perfectly functional neighborhood community so that the land could be given over to GM for a factory. Supposedly this was for the "public good." In reality, it was for GM's bottom line. And Donald Trump once got Alantic City NJ to condemn an old woman's home so he could build a limo parking lot. WTF???
(In the spirit of full disclosure, L and I have specific personal reasons to want to discourage local governments from using eminent domain, and I admit that's a bias. We're potentially under a real threat, as we've been approached once and turned them away.)