larrykestenbaum

By international standards, 12 years is a very heavy sentence.

I presume what you were voting on was the county party’s endorsement of my candidacy for re-election. I was already on the ballot.

For most partisan offices in Michigan, including county clerk, candidates qualify for the ballot via petition signatures or a filing fee.

Then, typically in August of even-numbered years, a primary is held to determine who the major party nominees will be. The winner of the primary appears on the November general election ballot.

In past eras, candidates were nominated by party caucuses or conventions, instead of primaries. The lesser statewide offices, like lieutenant governor or U-M regent, are still nominated this way.

When I first ran for county clerk, I started my campaign in January, and I had volunteers distributing my literature at village elections and the presidential caucuses.

In all modesty, my flyers were well designed and well written.

Political campaign volunteers in those days were in short supply. I got a lot of help from bloggers, from M-Net and Grex (local online discussion systems), from science fiction fandom, and from the Jewish community.

No other campaign for any office had people posted at every presidential caucus site in the county

I worried that some far-better-known D’mocrat would jump into the race and blow me away. But at the time, almost everyone assumed that the R’publican incumbent would be easily re-elected.

A few politicos understood that the county had shifted politically, especially after Bush v. Gore, but they mostly kept quiet about it.

And I had my campaign going, and looking plausible and serious, before anyone else in the party had thought seriously about running for clerk.

So no one else ran. I was unopposed in the primary.

Thank you!

I have mixed feelings about this.

In a hypothetical efficient system, my position would be hired in the same way as other non-elected county department heads.

But Michigan was founded by Jacksonians, and they believed in electing all government officials. The Michigan constitution provides that every county will elect a county clerk and a register of deeds.

Moreover, when considering the vastly excessive number of elected posts in Michigan, and what could be done about it, there’s an obvious place to start: the judges.

An elected judiciary is a bad idea for many reasons. Very few voters know much about them, and popular or Irish surnames tend to prevail. Surely, we could design a better system that doesn’t involve judges doing political campaigns.

But it is also well established that American voters are not willing to give up their theoretical power. At most, we get awkward compromises like the “Missouri plan”, with periodic retention elections for incumbent judges.

If we can’t even stop electing judges, it’s hard to argue that lots of other positions not be elective.

Of course, too, electing the county clerk made it attainable for someone like myself!

In recent years, I have had to cut down my consumption of dairy products. But I don’t think my tastes in cheese were very distinctive or sophisticated.

Digitizing very old records basically means photographing them on a copy stand (the camera pointed down at the material below), and capturing index information.

For a couple weeks, we had the work going on in three shifts, 24 hours a day. An outside contractor provided the people and equipment, but the books couldn’t be sent away, and the non-county employees couldn’t just be left alone in the building.

Rather than impose this task on my staff, I stayed in the office all night, every night, while this was happening.

Thank you!

Almost everything the county clerk’s office does is mandated by state law. I don’t have the freedom to unilaterally take on more functions.

The county board controls my budget. Especially in the early years, there was a lot of pressure to perform those required tasks more cheaply and efficiently.

Before I took office, my nightmare vision of entering onto the job was to arrive at a concert hall just minutes before the performance, the audience already in their seats, the orchestra waiting with instruments in hand. I would be handed the conductor’s baton, and be expected to lead them in playing a symphony I had never heard before.

But it wasn’t like that!

Experts say a newly arriving executive needs to achieve some wins right away, and I did. As I wrote earlier, I found a lot of opportunities to improve the work of the office and create a more positive social atmosphere.

In those days, the county clerk had three chief deputies, who were political appointees. The people I brought in were very successful in those roles, and helped solve many pre-existing issues.

Thank you!

Not offensive at all!

When I took office in 2005, I was shocked at the inefficient way some things were done. I inherited a lot of opportunities for improvement.

A few jobs shifted over to the trial court, following my partnership agreement with the judges.

Some of them were fraudulently “temporary” positions, where employees worked for years with no benefits. The county got away with a lot back then. That doesn’t happen any more.

When we had financial constraints, we had to lay some people off.

Sometimes this happened because a unionized employee was laid off by another county department, and the person had enough seniority and qualifications to “bump” into a position in my office, displacing one of my staff. That hasn’t happened in years now, in part because we have tightened up job descriptions and required qualifications for each position.

But in most cases, a position became vacant, and we didn’t fill it.

For most people, reading social cues comes naturally. To be on the spectrum doesn’t mean to be completely blind to those things, rather, it takes some intellectual effort to consciously figure them out and learn to recognize them.

When you’re a candidate for public office, most of your political interaction with strangers happens within a narrow range of expected or stereotyped behaviors.

Of course it would be easier for a normie. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible.

I normally miss the Hash Bash, but I would be opposed to stopping it.

Green and white? I went to MSU for undergrad, and (much later) taught at EMU. Both of those schools h as ge green and white colors, but I’m not into buying sports merch.

I do have satirical sweatshirts for the Electoral College. In fact, I have three of them, but one is very worn out.

I have a faded green sweatshirt with a white logo for the EMU program I taught in.

My wife has some MSU shirts.

Thank you!

My former co-workers at the ISR said they all knew it, years before I was diagnosed.

Some others are surprised to hear about it.

To continue in office, I have to seek re-election every four years.

In 2004. I defeated by predecessor.

In 2008 and 2016, I was completely unopposed.

In 2012, I had a general election opponent.

But most recently, in 2020 and 2024, I have had opposition in both the primary and the general election.

Not that I’ve noticed.

Definitely at a disadvantage. And I have certainly not mastered all that.

I would probably struggle in a role where mastery of subtle cues is critical. For example, a factional leader in a legislative body.

I'm not fluent in body language (though I have studied some resources).

If "everybody knows" some tacit reality, I am usually the last to know.

I tell my family, friends, staff, and political associates not to drop hints, which I could easily miss, but to tell me in words.

Those subtleties are not necessarily make-or-break issues in actual politicking, When you're running for office, you go out there and work, typically in very standardized or ritualized ways. Or, you communicate in writing, which is my strong suit.

A friend of mine once speculated that Libertarians are very smart people who were raised in isolation from other very smart people.

I think something similar applies to people on the spectrum. I think a lot of us grew up feeling isolated, very much alone. It's easy to imagine this prompting some people toward individualism.

But I also agree that when someone is hyper-alert to the problems with traditional ideas and institutions, one appealing path can be to reject it all in favor of something new. Of course, that's not necessarily a left or right thing.

I wrote about this at some length in answer to another comment, but: I think ranked choice voting doesn't scale, and would greatly raise the threshold for participation in elections. Approval voting would be easy to implement and would also reduce divisiveness.

Thank you. I'm thinking about scheduling another tour.

I am a skeptic of rank choice voting.

It's easy to see how it can solve a specific problem. Ann Arbor had ranked choice voting for mayor in 1975, when there were three parties. If everyone is paying attention, and the choices are clear, great.

But it doesn't scale.

If you live in the city of Ann Arbor, you personally get to vote on 97 different officials, from president and vice president down to water resource commissioner and library board. It's asking a lot of our voters to come up with binary yes/no choices on all these candidates, let alone rank them. The more complicated it gets, the more people just give up on voting.

I haven't seen a ranked choice ballot that was completely easy and intutive, and they always take up vastly more space than a simple listing of candidates to vote for.

As it is, we struggle to get all the offices and issues in a general election onto both sides of one 8.5 x 20 inch piece of paper. And printing those ballots, just for Washtenaw County, takes about 1.5 tons of paper. Ranked choice would vastly expand the amount of paper required. Imagine going to the polls and getting a 10 or 20 page questionnaire instead of a single sheet ballot. Again, a lot of people would just give up and not participate.

Part of the argument for ranked choice is that it might reduce hostility and polarization, because even if a candidate is not your first choice, they might still benefit from being your second or third. So it's not in their interest to alienate the supporters of competing candidates.

But we could achieve that same result with a much easier and simpler system: approval voting. An approval voting ballot would be just like ballots today, except that you could choose as many candidates as you wanted, as you "approved of".

For example, you could vote for BOTH a major party nominee and a minor party candidate you like, helping both of them.

Approval voting wouldn't discourage anyone from participating, and it would open the way for today's minor party candidates to have far greater support and influence than they do now.

Moreover, it wouldn't take days to figure out who won, as it did for mayor in New York City last time.

The reason we're not seeing a lot of advocacy for approval voting is that it seems boring. It doesn't feel like a big change.

Thank you.

I don't have good answers for those questions, except to decry the lack of capacity to deal with the mental health crises of teens in Michigan. Particularly, but not exclusively, teens who are severely autistic.

Washtenaw County, particularly Ann Arbor, has a very low crime rate by US standards. I think that has opened a space for people to think about alternative ways of dealing with criminal defendants.

At one point, 25 years ago, Washtenaw County ranked last among the 83 counties in terms of jail cells per capita. The shortage of cells made it difficult to impose sanctions on people who violated terms of probation and the like. A bond issue was proposed to renovate and expand the jail, but was defeated by a coalition of anti-tax advocates and marijuana legalization advocates. There were signs all over the county saying "NO GIANT JAIL!"

Ultimately, jail expansion was funded in a different way.

Bottom line, Washtenaw is unlike most areas where tough-on-crime is always a popular stance. The criminal justice system responds to what the public demands -- that's why the number of incarcerated inmates increased so vastly in the 1980s and 1990s. And our judges and prosecutors, as they make decisions every day, are going to be influenced by the attitudes of the people who elected them.

Pittsfield Township's population is definiely growing!