Further thought on yesterday.s local election

Forty years ago I was editing a Democratic newsletter (in California) and had to call on a friend who worked for the local newspaper to get access to its morgue in order to get historical records on what the local candidate thought and had done. Turned out that he regularly introduced legislation to eliminate the income tax without suggesting how the budget shortfall would be met. My favorite of his ideas was that there was a secret invasion of the United States by spear carrying African natives.

In the election yesterday I noted that thousands of voters chose to vote for Robin Ficker, and cited with references a number of reasons that I thought they should not have done so. It took me a half hour on the Internet to get all those references. The change in technology has made a huge amount of information available which was once only accessible to a privileged minority.

On the other hand, I think few of the potential voters were aware of that information. It had been reported in the past, but the papers, television, and even the forums for the candidates did not collect and summarize the information for the mildly interested voter.

There is an old saw, "you can take a horse to water, but you can't make him read". Today we might say, "you can take the information to the voter, but you can't make him read".