Over the last several months, Berkeleyside has run many dozens of articles on Berkeley’s mayoral election, council seat races, the school board contest, the rival rent board slates and most of the 10 city measures on the ballot tomorrow. On top of that, our collaboration with MapLight on Voter’s Edge Berkeley provides a handy one-stop site for information about the ballot measures. And our Opinionator op-ed section has overflowed with rival views about various election issues.
What Berkeleyside is not going to do is make any endorsements in the election. There are two reasons why. First, we believe in an educated, informed citizenry. Newspaper endorsements are a relic of a pre-Internet era when readers had to rely on insiders to tell them what was what. Our goal is to make sure you have as much information as we have, so you can make up your own mind. We don’t feel the urge to make it up for you. Second, we work hard to be impartial in our news reporting of Berkeley. Even if we convince ourselves that we could create neat compartments between our opinions and our reporting, our readers would be understandably skeptical.
Instead, we thought we could give you a pithy guide to our coverage. If you voted early, well done. If you’re waiting to get your “I Voted” sticker tomorrow, we hope the following helps. Whatever your choices, do get out and vote.
Mayor
Incumbent Tom Bates faces more uncertainty than in his past three races thanks to the advent of ranked choice voting. If you’re going to read one article on the mayoral contest, we wrote about the potential consequences of RCV last week. As always, there are further related articles linked at the bottom of the post.
Council races
The heated District 5 race between incumbent Laurie Capitelli and Sophie Hahn has attracted a lot of attention. You’ll find the best summary in Emilie Raguso’s October 11 article. For the District 3 race between incumbent Max Anderson and Dmitri Belser, read this. If you’re in District 2, weighing the choice between incumbent Darryl Moore and challengers Denisha DeLane and Adolfo Cabral, read our story that sees it as a battleground over Measure T.
School board
The three serious candidates for the two open seats, incumbent Beatriz Leyva-Cutler, Judy Appel and Tracy Hollander, don’t have major policy differences, but they do bring very different experiences to the race. Berkeleyside looked at the different perspectives last week.
Rent board
Two rival slates, Berkeley Tenants United for Fairness and the Tenant Convention Slate, are vying for four open seats on the Rent Stabilization Board. Judith Scherr rounded up the differing views on Berkeleyside.
Measures
Voter’s Edge is the best source for a quick dip into all the measures. But we also focused more deeply on a few of the most contentious measures in Berkeley. On the sit ordinance, Measure S, check out our round-up of the arguments pro and con last week (one gauge of contention: that article has 146 comments and counting). On the West Berkeley Plan revisions, Measure T, we weighed viewpoints on both sides in an Oct. 29 article.
On Election Night, Berkeleyside will be liveblogging all the Berkeley results right here, and we’ll be active on both our Twitter feed (#berkvote) and Facebook. Readers are encouraged to chip in with their thoughts and observations, and send us your photos and videos of Election Day in Berkeley.
