A Newby's Guide to Local Elections and Why They Matter

I’m going to assume that many of you reading this are in some ways similar to me – American citizens with a general desire to vote and a hope that our country’s best days are still ahead.

If those things are true, I’m also guessing that you, like me, are at least fairly disappointed with the prospects for the presidential election this fall. None of the options we have, to me, are attractive or inspiring. I can’t personally remember many presidential elections, only back to Dole vs. Clinton in 1996, but I’ve never been this unimpressed with the candidates. In complete honesty, I would happily vote for either of the major candidate’s running mates instead, if I could.

The good part of this situation is that it’s turned my attention to elections I haven’t paid much, if any, attention to in the past, and that in all reality might have more of an impact on my life and my family than the presidential election. These elections include U.S. Senators and Representatives, but even more the local bonds, school-board elections, and positions like county commissioner and school board. These elections are usually not glamorous, and tend not to be funded by billionaire donors or superPACs, but I would argue they have at least as much influence on our lives as the presidential elections have.

What kind of schools do we want our children to go to? What kinds of parks do we want to walk and play in? How should we pay for the road improvements we need (cough, Pleasant Grove, cough)? What will Person X do about the landfill if elected to the county planning and zoning commission? How can we help the homeless? Should net-metering for electricity be continued for homes with solar panels? Should teachers in our schools be allowed or encouraged to carry concealed weapons to school?

These kinds of issues are and should be, I believe, primarily local issues decided by local voters. Local solutions can be tailored to meet local conditions, and maybe even more importantly, they get people like me, who are often only engaged in politics every four years or so, involved and working on making the world around us a little bit better. Math is in your favor in a local election as well. About 120 million people voted in the 2012 presidential election, so if you’re hoping that your vote will make a real difference, local elections maximize your vote’s impact.

The hardest part about local elections is that they can be hard to get good information on. To help with that, at least for those of you here in Utah, here’s a link to a state webpage that allows you to input your street address and see a complete list of elections and ballot items customized for you – from President down to local ballot initiatives. It includes links to each candidate’s profile page (which usually includes a link to their personal or campaign website). Just input your address and then click the green, “Sample Ballot, Profiles, Issues” button. If your state has a similar system and you have the link, post it below!

Link: https://vote.utah.gov/vote/menu/index  

Other Related Links: http://perspectivesonthenews.blogs.deseretnews.com/2013/11/05/are-you-voting-today-local-elections-matter-most/

My Top 10 Books So Far:

After seeing a couple of my friends post their "Top 10" book lists recently, it got me thinking a lot about what books have been most impactful in my life. I have always loved reading. Gordon B. Hinckley, a man I admire in many ways, put it well:

“I love libraries. I love books. There is something sacred, I think, about a great library because it represents the preservation of the wisdom, the learning, the pondering, of men and women of all the ages accumulated together under one roof to which we can have access as our needs require."

I had a lot of fun thinking about this, talking with my wonderful wife about it, and writing this up. Thanks Mal, for staying up late listening to me ramble about these. Just as a little disclaimer, I wrote this list excluding all scripture / religious text. I'll save that for another blog post. 

Top 10:

1.     My Side of the Mountain

a.     Hatchet

b.     Bryan’s Winter

c.      Swiss Family Robinson

d.     Rascal

e.     Summer of the Monkeys

f.      Tom Sawyer

g.     Huckleberry Finn

h.     Across Five Aprils

Yes, I realize that some of you math majors might be saying I only have one slot left in my Top 10 list now, but it’s my blog post so I get to make the counting rules. My Side of the Mountain was my boyhood dream written down. This book about a boy who hitch-hikes into the woods, builds a home in a hollow tree and lives happily off the land until his family decides to come live with him (instead of forcing him back to “civilization”) spoke to my boyhood soul and lit a campfire that still burns there, stoked by all the rest of those sub-bulleted books. Sure, there’s some deep philosophy in some of them, but even once I realized that, I didn’t let it stop me from romping through these youthful voyages. 

2.     Lord of the Flies

To me, this book, which I had to read in high school, was the antithesis of all the books in number one. At first, I hated Lord of the Flies for what I felt was its defeatist, degenerate theme. However, it is excellently written and forced me to re-examine why I loved books like My Side of the Mountain. In the end, it helped me see that to be anything more than wishful thinking or a martyr in any situation, the right must also have and exercise might wisely.

3.     Redwall

The fantasy story of a mouse who thinks he’s a nobody, but finds out who he really is just in time to save everybody from a horde of attacking vermin. Besides being a fantastic adventure story with a “find the hero inside you and save the world” theme, author Brian Jaques’ rich descriptions sit his readers down at feasts in the great hall and makes theirs mouths water, then sends them up on the walls and makes them shake with fear as they face the enemy horde.

4.     The Magician’s Nephew

C.S. Lewis mesmerized me with this book. It was very different and even strange compared to what I normally liked to read, but his description of the creation of Narnia still gives me shivers. I’ve only read some of the rest of the Narnia collection, but I love this one the best.

5.     The Giver

The movie is ok. The book is a life-changer. Read this before you read any other dystopian book. The end.

6.     A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens in general)

Whew! Dickens pushed my reading abilities, but in A Tale of Two Cities, this acrobat of prose and plot kept me going, even through the slow parts (Is that an ironic statement?) and crafted one of the most potent stories I’ve ever read. His “authoritarian” (get it?) command of the English language seems to surge off the pages.

7.     The Count of Monte Cristo

Pirates. Adventure. Buried Treasure. Honor. Revenge. Redemption. Awesome book.

8.     Sherlock Holmes

Holmes is a great combination of philosophy, mystery and adventure. Can you tell I like British authors? Yes, I know Dumas was French.

9.     The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens

All the good stuff from the original Seven Habits book, minus a couple hundred pages and with a lot more pictures. This authentic, open book really did help me a lot. In a funny, easy to digest way, it makes you stop and think about what you really want to accomplish in life, and helps you see how you can get there. The MBA classes I’ve taken so far have come back to these principles over and over again.

10.  Man’s Search for Meaning

Viktor Frankl, a psychologist’s, autobiographical description of surviving the Holocaust both physically and mentally. First his account scarred me, then it healed me. I’ll always remember his description of walking out of one concentration camp as he watched smoke rising from the smoke-stacks and how he found out later that smoke likely contained the remains of his wife. His book is raw and open, but its message’s ability to come to terms with and overcome the most horrible of circumstances is uplifting. Our poor world needs messages like his.

Honorable Mention:

Because I needed another way to get more books on this list.

• Louis L'amour (his books in general)
• I read way too many of these in high school. My favorite was The Beat of the Walking Drum.
• Ender's Game
• This brilliant little book probably only missed the Top 10 because I read it for the first time only a couple years ago. In time, it likely will be right next to The Giver on my list. 
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
• In all truth, a magical read. In my humble, and I'm sure, minority, opinion, this was the best book of the series, or at least as many as I read. I got lost somewhere in book five and never finished...
• The Ugly American
• Although I never quite finished this one either, it changed the way I see America in the world and how I think of American foreign policy. It steeled my belief in democracy in a way social studies never did, as well as my desire to make a difference in the world. 
• Calvin and Hobbes
• How could anyone not love this? I know it's not necessarily "literary" but it is hilarious, and often actually very thoughtful.
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
• Jules Verne at his best. An easy classic. 

Brett's Top 5 Apps / Websites

I'm they type of guy who can easily blow a half hour reading articles from magazines like Fast Company or Popular Mechanics, and barely realize it. I'm no guru, but in the spirit of those periodicals, I present my own list of most useful / coolest, free apps or websites that I think people should know about and consider using. Click on the section titles to visit each website / app's page.

No. 5: 'My Verizon' app

Yes, I know this is specific to Verizon smart-phone customers. But, given the fact that nearly 100 million people use Verizon, more than any other carrier, this is still pertinent to a lot of you. The app, despite being a bit clunky, allows you to easily see how much of your plan you've used so far in the month. 

You can do other stuff too, like bill-pay or make changes to your plan, but really, the main value seems to be in instantly seeing if you're about to run out of minutes or data. No more texting a code to get your usage sent back to you - you can actually use your smart-phone like a smart-phone and see the data in a nice little bar-graph on your screen. Novel idea, huh? And, somewhat surprisingly, the app is free from from the app store. 

No. 4: Onavo Extend

Anyone with an iPhone or Android who has to pay for their own data plan ought to have this free app. The app stretches your data plan by routing all your 3G and 4G data through its servers and compressing it. This means more GPS, more streaming video, Pandora, Facebook, and anything else you use your phone's internet connection for without worrying about going over your plan and getting charged extra. 

I've had the app since mid-January and have saved about 20 MB. For as much as I use my iPhone 4S's web-based apps (~700 MB in the same time period), that's not tons, but it certainly is nice knowing I'm that much less likely to go over my allotted 2 GB (2,000 MB) and have to pay extra data fees. The other nice thing is that I haven't ever noticed a difference in quality or speed. 

As for security, PC Magazine had this to say in their glowing review, 

"Onavo's system runs on Amazon's EC2 cloud servers. Its servers are protected by multiple layers of security, and nothing is actually stored on them except for aggregated and anonymized metadata, such as what types of apps are being using. That information is used to help illustrate your data usage and savings, as well as for research to help improve the service." 

Sounds pretty safe to me.

No. 3: LDS Gospel Library app

Getting over 60,000 reviews and having a 4+ rating on iTunes is no small feat (8,300+ reviews for the current version). Admittedly, this iPhone / Android app is targeted at members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, but even if you're not Mormon, you should still check it out (I'll get to that in a minute).

The app puts the King James Bible, Book of Mormon, and other standard works, as well as nearly every single Sunday-school manual, General Conference talk, hymns (except a few that have copyright complications), those seminary videos you know you miss, and other resources like Preach My Gospel into the most easily navigated and easily studied format I could imagine. Not only can you easily access all this material on your phone anytime, you can also highlight, take notes that are as long as you like and can be edited later, and add hyperlinks to other verses, manuals, or talks.

As well, the app syncs with your LDS.org account and tracks all of your highlights and notes from LDS.org and your Gospel Library app into a study notebook. This takes your study of the gospel to a whole new level. Besides all this, the search functionality is quite good. For a guy who only remembered his Sunday-school manual once and might have found his leather bound scriptures more often in the meetinghouse lost-and-found as a kid than in his own lap, this app is simply awesome. 

If you're not Mormon, first forgive my enthusiasm, but let me explain why this app is still worth downloading. If you are Christian and want what is arguably the best Bible app available - this one's free. The rest of the 'good news' for you is that you only download what you want. So, if all you want is the King James version Old and New Testaments, that's all you download. They still come with all the hyperlinked cross-references and the app is still well laid out and searchable. No, those guys in white-shirts and ties will not track you via the app and try to baptize you. If you are not Christian, then check it out for the sake of seeing how well put together it is. I don't think you'll be disappointed. 

No. 2: Trello.com

Great apps and websites have two things: great content and great functionality. In the case of Trello.com, the free organizing website and smart-phone app, the content is your life (or your organization's life) and the projects you're working on. The functionality is one of the easiest to use interfaces I've come across in while. 

Although the best way to understand Trello is to try it (see the link in the title), I'll do my best to explain it here. Say that hypothetically you're a really busy person who works with more than one group (classes, work, church, volunteering, etc.) at once. Within each of those groups, you probably have more than one project going at once, and within each of those projects, there are tasks and subtasks that you have to remember and complete. Sound familiar? 

Trello makes it easy to organize it all by letting you make "boards" (for each organization, per say), and then lets you list each of the projects and tasks as either "to-do's", "doings", or "dones" in an at-a-glance format that is easy to look at. You can add detail to each by clicking a given task and adding check-lists, due-dates, comments, and more.

When I posted this, I'd been using Trello for about two weeks. It has become a near permanent tab in my browser and the more I use it the more I like it. The only function I haven't used so far is the group collaboration portion which allows you share your boards and lists with other Trello users so your groups and teammates can stay on top of projects better. Of course, the effectiveness of any tool like this is whether or not you actually use it, but so far, Trello has made it really easy for me to keep using. 

No. 1: Mint.com

Stress over financial issues is the number one source of stress for Americans, according to the American Psychological Association. That, and the fact that this website's functionality and content are superb put Mint.com at the top of my list. Banks, credit-card companies and others let you manage your accounts with them online, but that only offers a fragmented picture of what's going on with your finances. Mint safely allows you to paint the full mural of your personal or family financial situation on one easy to see and understand canvas and then gives you the tools and help necessary to improve it. 

The free service works like this. You sign up and create a strong password (more on security later). Next, you enter your credit card, banking, checking, and investment account information. Mint establishes a read-only connection to your various accounts and reads in the information from each. Every time you buy something with a credit card, debit card, or check, Mint records and tries to automatically categorize the expense and does a surprisingly good job of getting it right (if it does mess up you can easily change it). You can easily see with various charts and graphs where your money is going and whether you're spending more than you make or not, what your net worth is, etc. Based on those facts, you're encouraged to set up budgets and make goals for cutting spending in some areas and (possibly) increasing it in others. 

What happens next is the real magic: The site, of course, wants to make money, but it does so  by saving you money. It uses the information you've provided to pick companies and ideas that will help you do things like get out of credit card debt, set and work towards savings goal, find a better interest rate, etc. 

Companies like Ally financial, CapitalOne, and more pay Mint to have the website suggest options that will save you money and help you achieve the goals you've told Mint you want to achieve. Talk about a win-win. It's in Mint's best interest to save you money, putting the big companies where they should be - serving you. Site users get pinpoint advice and tools to take control of their financial situation and achieve their goals and companies get to offer catered options to people who are more likely to use their services. Isn't capitalism great? 

For example, say you want to stop renting and buy a house sometime in the future. In the "Goals" section, "Buy a Home" happens to have a template, and based on your annual income Mint explains how much of a house you can probably afford and then explains how you'll have to take into consideration insurance, interest rates, a down-payment, and property taxes and gives you information about national averages and best practices for estimating these expenses. Based on your situation, Mint then gives you a suggested goal that you should start saving towards and presents you with options for starting to save, like a high interest savings or money market account from a couple different reputable banks. There are similar templates for buying a car, paying off loans, or creating a custom goal. Mint then tracks your progress on each goal and allows you to adjust your goals as your situation changes. 

Security, of course is a concern with anything like this. Some will not like the idea of putting information about all of their different accounts in one place online. Remember though that Mint can only establish "Read-only" connections to your accounts, meaning it can only see what's going on, it can't actually make transactions. You will still have to go to your bank or credit-card's websites and enter those user-names and passwords to move money around (hopefully you're not using the same password for all your online accounts. If you are, change them.).

I've been using Mint for about six months now and have a hard time thinking about what I would do without it. Sure, there are other options, but none that I know of are as convenient and easy to use. 

That's all!

So, what do you think? Are there sites or apps that I totally missed that blow these ones out of the water? Will you start using any of these or check them out? There were several that were close, but didn't quite make the cut, like grovo.com, carbonite.com, and more, so let me know what you think in the comments. Thanks!