Election 2015: Voting & Endorsements

I just voted in Alexandria. Here are my ballot choices:
State Senate – Saslaw
State House – Herring
Mayor – Silberberg
City Council (6) – Chapman, Lovain, Smedberg, Wilson, Ann Poe (write in), Kenneth Kerns (write-in)
School Board (3) – Campbell, Gentry, Lewis

Saslaw and Herring are doing fine in Richmond, so I kept those incumbents. Silberberg won my support in the primary and her write-in opponent lost any chance at it during his negative direct mail campaign. I ran into supporters of much of the School Board slate, and also ran into two of the candidates themselves (including Campbell).

Yes, for City Council, I wrote myself in, as is my habit when I don’t have a strong opinion about the full slate. (Back at UF, for example, I once wrote myself in for Student Body Treasurer when I knew it was headed for a runoff.) The 4 candidates I did vote for were perfectly good incumbents, particularly Smedberg and Wilson.

The crazy thing about this particular Election Day, as I said, was the sheer number of volunteers and candidates staked out in front of my precinct at 4pm. Seeing more than one disinterested person with a flyer is quite unusual for the pre-afternoon-rush hour, even during high-stake presidential elections. But maybe the various local campaigns are seeing a tight race and wanted to make sure they got every last vote.

It’ll be interesting to see how things turn out tonight.

Update: Of the candidates for which I voted, all won except my two write-ins (duh). Also, Jeremy McPike, one of only two candidates I’ve made small donations to this year, won an open-seat in the state Senate. (The other candidate I donated to was Lawrence Lessig, a champion of campaign finance reform who was running in the Democratic presidential primary and recently withdrew.) It was quite an incumbent-retention election, as very few seats changed hands in Virginia. And Silberberg’s decisive win was a nice victory against a power-hungry source of negativity.