elections

Four years ago, Libby Schaaf won Oakland’s election for mayor. Since then, the city has experienced major changes, from a rise in homelessness to a tech and real estate boom and winning NBA championships. Mayor Schaaf is campaigning for re-election and is up against nine other candidates.

It’s election season and the Oakland mayor’s race is underway. Ten candidates are vying for the big city position. As in past elections, KALW will bring you interviews with all the mayoral candidates.

In 2017, Federal Elections Committee chair Ann Ravel resigned saying: “The mission of the FEC is essential to ensuring a fair electoral process. Yet, since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, our political campaigns have been awash in unlimited, often dark, money.”

San Francisco just wrapped up an intense mayoral election. There’s another major race for mayor coming up. This time in Oakland.

The California Constitution currently says that any ballot measure passed by voters will go into effect the day after election day, unless the proposition states otherwise.

Proposition 71 supporters say that’s not enough time.

For one thing, mail ballots can arrive up to three days after the election and still get counted.

So, if passed, Proposition 71 would impose a five-day waiting period after all votes have been fully and completely counted and the Secretary of State has certified the election.

California’s recent six-year drought was the worst the region had experienced in over 500 years.

Water restrictions imposed by the state during the drought led many residents to start collecting water themselves, with buckets in their showers, rain barrels in the yard, or more complicated rainwater storage contraptions.

Homeowners who installed rainwater capture systems to conserve water may have had to pay higher property taxes as a result. That’s because constructing these systems can count as a property improvement.

California’s Proposition 70 is about cap-and-trade money, so at its core, it’s a proposition about how the state is addressing climate change.

That’s because cap-and-trade is a program designed to curb the use of greenhouse gases. Certain companies need to get permits for the greenhouse gases they create.

California’s Proposition 69 is concerned with fuel taxes and transportation.

Last year California’s state legislature voted to raise the gas tax, the diesel tax, and vehicle registration fees.

The bill they passed said that all $52 billion of revenue would go to transportation projects — like road repair and public transit.

Prop 68 is all about the environment. It’s known as the Parks, Environment, and Water Bond. 

And if it’s approved, it would collect over $4 billion for those issues.

On this edition of Your Call, we examine partisan voting districts. In 2012, Republicans held the House even though they got 1.4 million fewer votes than Democrats. Republicans also won majorities in states across the country even though more voters backed Democrats. Why? Gerrymandering.

On this week’s media roundtable, we’ll discuss coverage of Turkey’s military assault on the Kurdish enclave of Afrin in Syria. The attack has displaced more than 5,000 people and more than 25 have been killed.

Eight candidates qualified Tuesday to run in San Francisco's mayoral race and the ballot could become even more crowded in a contest expected to pit the city's progressive values against its thirst for economic development following years of spectacular but divisive growth driven by the technology sector.

In Playing with Fire, MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell recalls the 1968 US presidential election that shaped American politics. 

We’ll have a conversation about gerrymandering and how it shapes the US electoral map.

Donald Trump’s victory has created fear, uncertainty and anxiety for many Americans. People say they are concerned about deportations, the travel ban, education, the future of the planet, and social programs.

This week, the House of Representatives voted to revoke an Obama era privacy rule, which required Internet providers to ask for your permission before selling your browsing history to the highest bidder. Major telecom companies including AT&T and Verizon lobbied to kill privacy protection rules.

This week, we’ll discuss coverage of the election in the Netherlands and the defeat of the anti-Muslim candidate Geert Wilders. Turnout was high at 82 percent.

We’ll speak with Rolling Stone’s Matt Taibbi about his new book Insane Clown President: Dispatches from the 2016 Circus. 

Our news department has a visiting journalist this year, Jürgen Klemm, a professional broadcaster from Estonia. His nation borders Russia; in fact, Estonia was occupied by the Soviet Union until 1991. Jürgen has seen the allegations of Russian involvement in the U.S. election. And he's heard President Trump's statements about NATO. We realized we can learn a lot from Jürgen's perspective, so we're debuting this new segment, 'Ask an Estonian.'

On the December 23rd edition of  Your Call, it’s our media roundtable. This week, on the last media roundtable of 2016, we will discuss how the media’s incessant and often uncritical coverage of Donald Trump and what they have learned from his electoral college victory.

What is the future of Bernie Sander’s movement? We’ll have a conversation with Becky Bond, senior adviser to the Sanders campaign and co-author of Rules for Revolutionaries: How Big Organizing Can Change Everything.

Nearly 1.8 billion people use Facebook each month. It’s become a go-to news source, and that’s had a big impact. In fact, some suggest that social media companies, including Facebook, impacted the presidential election by encouraging fake news and polarizing political views.

On the November 30th edition of Your Call, we’ll discuss the electoral college.

On the November 25th edition of  Your Call, it’s our Friday media roundtable. This week, we’ll have a conversation with media scholar Robert McChesney about the political economy of the mass media and journalism in the US.