For anyone who is interested, this is the ballot that Becky and I will be voting on later today, as residents of Beverly, Massachusetts, Ward 2, Precinct 1.

Of the local candidates, we’ve received flyers at home from Mary Grant and Frank Cousins. I’m not sure that I’ve even heard of any of the other local candidates, and I definitely had no clue that there were two Questions on the ballot.

The Boston Globe has an Election 2004 section. The Globe has historically endorsed Democratic candidates, but their election page at least provides some information on local candidates and issues.

Update
I’ve collected some articles, reports, and letters regarding the various local candidates who are not running unopposed:

State Representatives for Beverly:
Mary Grant, responding to a questionaire in the Beverly Citizen.
Jack Murray, responding to the same questionaire.
Donato Paglia, again responding to the same questionaire.
Beverly Citizen Editorial: Mary Grant for state rep

Can’t find anything to link to on the Sheriff’s race, and the rest of the candidates are running unopposed. I guess that gives us less to focus on!

Update
Here’s the Project Vote Smart page for our locality.

I read a post over at Jesse Ruderman’s blog on how he calculated that one could win the Presidential election with only 21% of the popular vote. His article is somewhat dense with technical terms, at least for the casual reader, but I think it would be an interesting read for anyone.

Jesse’s article got me thinking about frustrating this whole election thing is. Even after reading news articles, blog entries, fact check websites, websites from any of the parties, watching numerous TV ads, listening to various radio ads… I am still one of those annoying undecided voters.
Continue reading →