Last week I noted that there would be a primary race for state representative in my district. I checked on league of women voters and found out that it is
the race since there is no Republican challenger (I also pondered the recipes on Ed Case, Hawaii-2's website, but that's another story).
So an update. My current representative Rosita Youngblood has been representing the district for over 10 years. A year or two ago she feuded with the Dem party and they cut funding for her office, so she no longer has a working office in the district (I believe there's an address, but nobody answers the phone or has office hours). Several people got into the race to oppose her.
She sued to have them all taken off the ballot because of improprieties in their petitions--that is she sued each and every one of her 5 or so challengers. (I don't know why Bush hasn't thought of this yet. Sue and get John Kerry off the ballot--there you go)
One of her challengers (and probably the most serious one) Marc Stier has been reinstated back onto the ballot by the courts. (There's a lot of legalese here but suffice it to say, Mr. Stier managed to prove at least 300 signatures on his petitions valid--which is good, because I signed one of them!)
Now I don't know about you, but somebody who sues to get everyone off the ballot is either on a power trip is afraid she'll lose the election. Also, this whole flap was once again covered in the neighborhood paper (too small an operation to be on the web) along with Stier saying something like "we saw a lot of questionable signatures on her petition, but we chose not to sue her and want to fight it out on election day instead". I will be very interested in the result...
We are also still trying to figure out who to vote for in the AG race because darn it, there's not a whole lot to get excited over on the Dem side of this primary, so it's just that and then waiting to see what happens in the Spector-Toomey race.