As you may or may not know, today is the day before the most contentious election in recent memory. Aside from the presidential race between a competent woman and a can of orange spray paint, there are also a host of down-ballot candidates at the federal, state, and local levels, and, here in San Francisco, an outstanding 42 state, regional, and city ballot propositions. As is usual, I've received a healthy pile of 77 pieces of election spam this season; here's my tally.

Overall, of the 77 pieces of mail that my wife and I received in the months leading up to this election, 15 of them were voting slates and 62 of them were either single-issue or, in many cases, dual-issue (U & P, Q & R). As far as I can tell, only a single one of them (the state-issued party-level official endorsements) even touched on the presidential campaign. Read on for details!

Let's start with the candidates for office:

Candidate	# In Favor	# Opposed
Hillary Clinton for President	1
Kamala Harris for US Senate	3
Nancy Pelosi for US Representative	1
Preston Picus for US Representative	1
Jane Kim for State Senate1	14	4
Scott Weiner for State Senate	5
David Chiu for State Assembly	5
Victor Hwang for Judge	5
Paul Henderson for Judge2	1
Aaron Peskin for Board of Supervisors3	2
Bevan Dufty for BART4	5
Gwyneth Borden for BART5	1
Shanell Williams for Community College Board	2
Amy Bacharach for Community College Board	1

Phew! That was a lot! Surprisingly, the US Senate race isn't being advertised very heavily in San Francsico, despite it being a fairly close race between Kamala Harris (the official Democratic endorsement) and Loretta Sanchez (also a Democrat; historically affiliated with the Blue Dogs). I don't want to get into the weeds, but I will point out⁶ that Loretta Sanchez is, to my knowledge, the only pro-encryption candidate in any race on this ballot. She even wrote a Medium post about encryption issues, which is pretty cool. Maybe she should've done some advertising around this issue?

Anyhow, next up: state propositions. The vast majority of these were from slates.⁷

Proposition/Initiative	# In Favor	# Opposed
Proposition 51	6
Proposition 52	7
Proposition 53		6
Proposition 54	1	4
Proposition 55	7
Proposition 56	7	4
Proposition 57	7
Proposition 58	7
Proposition 59	7
Proposition 60	1	7
Proposition 61	1	4
Proposition 62	6
Proposition 63	5
Proposition 64	6
Proposition 65		4
Proposition 66		5
Proposition 67	6

Finally, the most contentious part of this election in San Francisco: the local propositions.

Proposition/Initiative	# In Favor	# Opposed
Proposition A	8
Proposition B	6
Proposition C	8
Proposition D	5	1
Proposition E	7
Proposition F	7
Proposition G	3
Proposition H	10	1
Proposition I	4
Proposition J	3
Proposition K	3	1
Proposition L	5	1
Proposition M	8	1
Proposition N	6
Proposition O	13	4
Proposition P	3	11
Proposition Q		5
Proposition R	1	5
Proposition S	8
Proposition T	3
Proposition U	3	11
Proposition V	9	23
Proposition W	11
Proposition X	9
Measure RR	9

As you can see, Prop V⁸ is the subject of the biggest spending; we started receiving no-on-V flyers as early as August.

There was also one item which didn't actually say what it was pro or anti; it just encouraged us to vote and to visit kidsnotprofits.com to learn more about how billionaries were taking over our educational system. As far as I can tell, it's concerned with charter schools, which aren't on the ballot.

That's it! That's the breakdown of how approximately $25 was spent to print and post advertisements to my household. If all 345,811 households in SF got this much spam, we should expect this election to cost approximately $8.6 million in printed advertising costs alone. I hope it's worth it.

I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, especially in the election between the most qualified candidate ever and a Nacho Cheesier rapist, but I guess I'll join the ever-present chorus reminding you that you should vote, because there has to be at least one issue you care about spread between the 9 offices and 42 propositions on the ballot.

See you next year for our next installment of Election Spam⁹.

1. I assume that everybody's seen Ms. Kim's goofy video ad already, but I'm linking to it anyway because it's exceptionally goofy. ↩

2. Mr. Henderson has upgraded from a wordpress.com domain since the primaries; good for him! ↩

3. There were actually a lot more than 2 for Mr. Peskin, but since he's running basically unopposed and I can't stand him, I didn't do a good job of counting them. Also, note that his website is just showing the text "pageok" as of this writing. ↩

4. Surprisingly, 2/5 of the pro-Bevan ads were single-issue ads. I didn't know that people felt that strongly about the BART board... ↩

5. I couldn't find an actual website, so I guess I have to link to her Twitter profile ↩

6. Hat tip to my friend Morgan Conbere for bringing this to my attention in an extremely well-worded Facebook post ↩

7. Full disclosure: my wife is heavily involved in the Yes-on-57 campaign. I think I should tell you to vote yes on 57. ↩

8. The Unhealthy Food Obviously Has Externalities That Are Not Considered In The Current System And Should Be Taxed But Soda Companies Like Money Tax ↩

9. Unless the morally and economically bankrupt cheese puff wins and the world ends before next year, but let's not worry too much about that scenario, eh? ↩