So, local elections coming up next week. I've moved to a new precinct - Bellefonte South. The real estate boosters call most of the precinct "Rainbow's End" - a neighborhood of neat, aging, well-kept ranches and Cape Cods - but I'm pretty sure my slice of town's still Downtown, which is noticeably lower-class, decrepit, and mostly tumble-down Victorian.

As for the ballot, well... There's no choices to speak of for mayor, tax collector, or the school directors. That last one - the system's set up to only deliver four choices for four seats - is sort of annoying, as our school district has a nasty habit of jumping at Cadillac solutions to problems & driving our school property taxes to county highs. Especially since they've been sniveling about insufficient classroom space for the primary school kids, which suggests they're getting ready to go on another construction binge.

I'm voting straight Republican on the judges, I think. I haven't noticed any serious beefs about any of the choices in that section, and Republicans are heuristically preferable to Democrats or anyone who would run for a judge's seat on the Libertarian ticket. Absent, of course, credible and convincing testimony to the contrary in individual cases.

The big local race is for District Attorney. The Republican incumbent has gotten caught up in a scandal over an assistant district attorney's inability to keep his private life and his job separate - there are a couple of lawsuits or somesuch ongoing, and a case or two got overturned because of the scandal. That's bad, but the Democratic opponent (whom I voted for in the Democratic primary, mind you) isn't really a very attractive alternative. She's a classic squishy soft-on-crime Clintonite faker, and I hate her signs - very liberal-fascist "smiley face on the sole of our jackboots" creepy. I'll probably hold my nose and vote for the guy who needs to keep a better eye on his jerkass subordinates. I will probably vote for the incumbents in the other county offices.

Lastly, borough council & the precinct offices. Council's a "race" between a Democratic "facilities manager" (I think that means janitorial super?) and a Republican who didn't even bother to respond to the local paper's request for information. Some research shows that he's an older DJ who's heavily involved in all the festivals and events-planning in the borough - all that crap that the Curtin Hill toffs live for, which clutters up Downtown for those sods who actually live there. Just based on my impressions of those two, I'm going to go with the Democrat - he seems less likely to waste my property taxes on the festival chrome, and more likely to waste it on guys leaning on shovels. Eh, a bit of a trade-off.

The Judge of Election and so forth are all "write-in". What the heck's up with that? Is there anybody running things in this precinct?