Vote "Yes" Today In Idaho's Treasure Valley

For my readers who live in the Boise/Meridian/Nampa/Caldwell area of Idaho, please remember to go to the polls today and vote "Yes" for the Community College initiative. A few extra dollars a year is a small price to pay to ensure the youth of our area have an affordable choice for post-secondary education outside of Boise State.

Also, for those in Meridian, please vote "Yes" on the library bond. Our growing city desperately needs a library in the southern part of the city, and it will cost the average homeowner less than $15/year over the next 13 years. Investing in the education of our community is a vote for a better future.

Update 2253 22 May: The Meridian library bond got a slight majority, but it needed a 2/3 supermajority to win. And while a local TV station reported the community college vote failed to get its needed 2/3 supermajority, the newspaper website is still reporting that the votes are still being counted.

I think the library people made a tactical mistake with this election. Last November, a similar bond issue failed, but got over 61% of the vote --this was when we voted in our normal precincts. This time, they only held the election in the main library, and didn't publicize too much that you could only vote there. One problem with this is that one of the reasons they were pushing the new library is that it really is a pain to get from the south side of town to the north where the library is, especially during "rush hour". As a result, I'd guess that most of the people who made it to vote for the initiative lived in the north part of town, and they won't really get much benefit out of the proposed new library. Those on the south side of town went to their normal precinct house to vote, and were surprised they couldn't vote for the library bond (or didn't even know about it), and figured it'd be too much of a hassle to drive all the way across town. This is one time when they shouldn't have tried to "game" the system by trying to "shape" the electorate to include mostly those people who use the service (like they do for school bond elections where they have voting only in the elementary schools).

Update 0625 23 May: It turns out that the Community College vote did get the required 2/3 "Yes" vote; the TV station that called it for "No" last night was saying this morning that there were a lot more absentee votes than normal (not surprising, since one of the strategies of the initiative's proponents was to get supporters to vote absentee) so that's why they were confused. We'll now be able to expect a lot of letters to the editor from anti-tax people saying that absentee ballots are un-American somehow.