The Year of Voting Dangerously: An Election Reader

With a wink to Thomas Hobbes, this year’s election season has been nasty, brutish and long. Very long. Today it comes to an end – on paper, at least – allowing us to look back on some of Capital & Main’s best reporting on issues that affect Californians on the most fundamental levels. Whether analyzing the historic possibilities of abolishing the death penalty or legalizing recreational marijuana use, our writers have brought you the voices, expertise and context needed to evaluate a host of ballot propositions.

• Bill Raden feels the Bern as Bernie Sanders fires up a rally to cut prescription drug prices through Proposition 61.
• Joel Warner profiles California mega-donor Bill Bloomfield’s efforts on behalf of charter schools.
• Bobbi Murray unpacks California Calls’ massive get-out-the-vote drive.
• Maria Bustillos reports from Arizona on how labor and Latino activists are changing the political landscape there.
• Our infographic breaks down the charter-school lobby’s spending splurge on California races.
• Eric Markowitz asks, Why Are Prison Guards Backing the Death Penalty?
• Judith Lewis Mernit traces the progressive origins of California’s long experiment in direct democracy and how corporate interests have learned to love it.
• Dean Kuipers looks at the perennial muscle of the tobacco industry, exercised this year over Proposition 56, which seeks an additional $2 tax on each pack of cigarettes.
• Judith Lewis Mernit writes about the deceptive setup that might cause California voters to veto a state law to ban single-use plastic bags even though 60 percent of those polled support it.
• Jim Crogan tallies up the enormous contributions Big Pharma has made to oppose Proposition 61, an initiative to control state agencies’ prescription drug costs.
• Sasha Abramsky reports on a local ballot measure that could significantly increase Los Angeles’ affordable housing stock.
• Bill Raden recalls how badly California was hit by the Great Recession.  He also talks to leading state education officials and classroom teachers talk about the damage done to schools by the recession and to teachers themselves.
• Bobbi Murray finds that just beyond the front steps of schools, communities, parents and non-teaching school staff were hurt by the initial budget cuts that, to this day, have not been fully restored.
• Judith Lewis Mernit reports on the ways that Prop. 30 restored funding to health and human services programs, particularly the state’s Denti-Cal program.
• Dean Kuipers talks to budget experts about Prop. 30’s decisive role in saving community colleges.
• Piper McDaniel examines how one small community in rural Northern California, whose residents turned to illegal marijuana growing in order to escape the region’s poverty, faces an uncertain future if legalized cannabis inaugurates an era of industrial pot production.
• Judith Lewis Mernit hears from experts about the brutal environmental damage inflicted by illegal marijuana cultivation.
• Melissa Chadburn sorts out the hype from reasonable expectations about Proposition 64.
• Judith Lewis Mernit looks at the potential for a brand-new legalized industry to get labor issues right the first time — not only with wages and job security, but in workplace safety.
• Pandora Young’s photographs capture scenes from two medical marijuana dispensaries – one, a union shop – in downtown Los Angeles and in Sherman Oaks.

• Plus illustrations by Lalo Alcaraz and infographics.
  

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  Photo: L.A. County Registrar-Recorder/County Clerk