It's a presidential election year, which means a whole slew of
state proposals will be on the ballot and all sorts of advertisements out trying to sway people to vote one way or another.
Chris and I don't watch a lot of live TV what TV we do watch is already on the DVR which means skipping the ads, so we've managed to avoid most TV advertisements regarding voting this way or that. Mail, however, is a different story. So far we've received two pieces of mail, one for
proposal 2 and one for
proposal 6.
If you look closely, both of these ads imply that if you support or don't support a proposal you will hurt the children. People, they just want you to think of your children.
Of course if you actually look up either of the proposals you'll see that they have nothing to do with school funding or children. I mean, proposal six is about a bridge and two is about a state constitutional amendment for collective bargaining.
Getting political mail doesn't bother me. It's the emotionally charged and misleading piece of paper landing in my mailbox that I find insulting. If I got a piece of paper that said
proposal 2 was about collective bargaining I'd be fine with it (even if i didn't necessarily agree with the stance it was taking). But the proposal 2 mailer we received says children will be at risk if it's adopted. It then goes on to cite from Michigan statutes (
MCL 381.230a and
MCL 257.1851) and implies that somehow those are impacted.
They're not.
Honestly I think putting the statute numbers on there is an attempt to make it seem more official.
Anyway, all of these things are really easy to look up these days. There is a
ballotpedia website that has all of the information right there for the proposals on the ballot.
You also no longer need to actually go to a library to look up statutes. You can look them up right on the
state legislature website.
Anyway, I'd strongly urge anyone voting (which anyone who is old enough should be, I think) to look up the actual language of the proposals (
ballotpedia has got you covered for whatever state you're in) and make a decision based on that, and not an emotionally manipulative piece of advertisement.