There might as well have been a tumbleweed blowing past the polling places in Mira Mesa.
Poll workers at Challenger Middle School told me mid-day that 59 people had been there to vote and maybe another 10 dropped off their ballots.
Of the few people I did see, here’s a little bit about why they stepped into the voter desert.
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For Susan, who declined to give her last name, voting was so important that she took baby steps to the polls on crutches. She said re-electing Gov. Jerry Brown was worth it.
“For a cranky old dude he’s been doing a pretty good job on getting us back on track,” she said.
Susan and her husband said they voted for Rep. Scott Peters because they didn’t like the Tea Party brand that is usually associated with Carl DeMaio. Susan thought when that when former Councilwoman Donna Frye publicly told DeMaio to stop using her name, it sent red flags.
For Jet Martin, an independent consultant, commercials in which DeMaio appears on a video telling a tea party crowd he’ll “owe” them if elected, swayed him to vote for Peters. Martin doesn’t feel like he can trust DeMaio because “he panders to whoever will give him a vote.”
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Other people said they voted for DeMaio and weren’t swayed by sexual harassment allegations against him.
Andrew Westfall, a marketing specialist, says that the allegations made him have less respect for the opposition. “It made me feel more convinced that it should not be his opponents,” Westfall said.
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Westfall also said he thought Proposition 1, which will help fund water infrastructure projects, was a good idea but was not hopeful it would pass, or that if it did, that the money would last. But he voted for the measure because “it’s the only chance we got.”
Ea Christensen voted against each proposition because she said she thinks there are always loopholes that allow funds to be misspent.
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When it came time to vote for the candidates, Christensen laughed and said, “I only voted for the candidates whose names I could pronounce, if I can’t pronounce their names then how would I talk about them?”