It's all about the lawn signs

I'm an idiot. It took me until today to figure out the purpose of lawn signs, and buttons, and bumper stickers, and how indispensible they are.

They're vital for small, off-year races or primary races where 99% of the voters have no idea who these people on the ballot actually are, or what they stand for, or if they're any good.

I didn't put any up this time around, and I'm kicking myself for it.

Lawn signs are word-of-mouth, basically. People around here know who I am, and they look and think, "h, he's got a sign for Candidate X, I guess he or she must be OK then". It has a very small influence. But that tiny influence often is all that's needed to change a vote. When you're standing in a voting booth, looking at two to five random names, and you know you didn't sit down with the voting booklet of course, and you're going, "OK, now what?", those lawn signs can make the difference between victory and defeat.

I've recently become a huge fan of Senator Debra Bowen, who is running for Secretary of State here in California. She is a fellow Kossack, and she's a huge champion of two things very very important to me: Clean Money, and Open Voting. Her candidacy is vitally important for both of those causes. Just last week I found out through the Open Voting mailing list that Bowen running behind her opponent in the polls... and I feel terrible for not doing more to campaign for her. It would have been so easy. All she needed was name recognition. I live on a fairly busy street in front of a school: lawn signs would have gotten dozens of eyes.

I never got behind lawn signs, because they just seemed like a waste of time. Who driving past your house cares if you're for Dean or Kerry or whomever? People make up their own minds and they don't care what your lawn sign says.

Except.

Except for these down-ballot and off-year races. Lawn signs are critical. Often the only thing you may know about a candidate is-- their name. That's it. And anything that helps their name recognition is huge.

This weekend I discovered a blog that had posted a PDF of a lawn sign for Bowen. Great, I thought, I'll print it out and put it up. But, it printed out wrong on my printer, in postage-stamp size instead of 8.5" x 11". And I never took the time to figure out how to fix it. And I'm still kicking myself for it.

On a positive note, three people have asked me for my ballot, knowing I keep up with this stuff, and so today I'm pretty confident I delivered at least 4 votes for Bowen. Not bad, but I suspect if these three folks cared enough about my opinion to ask, others might have been influenced a bit by some more passive means of expressing my opinion: lawn signs, buttons, bumper stickers, etc.

I read in a diary about a "ballot party" where politically-active people sit and compare ballots, argue about their picks, and hopefully influence each other and maybe even vote in a bloc. That's cool; I want to try that too. But then, I want to actively go out and disseminate that.

I can only hope that right now, some of those three people are out there Xeroxing my ballot, and passing it along. If that happens, great. But next time I'm going to make it easier, and hopefully have a bit more impact.