The Iowa State Representative election is probably the most interesting vote I made. This is the first race involving the CIETC scandal. Apparently a lot of money went into the Central Iowa Employment and Training Consortium, and not a lot of employment and training came out. Ako Abdul-Samad, running as a Democrat, was on the CIETC board, and didn’t convince me that he was innocent of the corruption charges being tossed at him. He lost my vote.

Jack Whitver, running as a Republican, successfully lost my vote by showing up at Abdul-Samad’s house after being told Abdul-Samad was unavailable due to family illness. Even assuming charitably that Abdul-Samad was lying about the family illness, that still makes Whitver a political moron.

Luckily I have two other candidates in this race. Brett Blanchfield, running as a Libertarian, gets points for being the only candidate to bother answering a candidate survey from the Iowa Prosperity Project. And he also gets points for living just a few houses down from me. But he’s campaigning on issues like repealing the mandatory seatbelt law. I can sympathize with the general libertarian desire to streamline government, but if seatbelts are the first (or second, or even twentieth) place a candidate identifies waste in government, he’s lost my vote.

That leaves only Jeff Johannsen. Lucky for me, Johannsen looks like a candidate for whom I can vote without reservation. He wants to help make health insurance more available and affordable to small businesses and neighborhoods [...] to increase availability of assisted living to those with low to moderate incomes [...] to promote the cleanup of neighborhoods and discourages urban sprawl, according to the Des Moines Register. That all sounds good to me, so I voted for Johannsen.