How do you plan to vote?

[tpfkaw]

How I voted in the (contested races in the) MA Democratic primary:

Governor: Steve Grossman
Lieutenant Governor: Steve Kerrigan (won)
Attorney General: Maura Healey (won)
Treasurer: Tom Conroy
Governor's Council: Marilyn Devaney (i, won)

And barring any unexpected developments, how I'd vote in the contested general election races:

Governor/Lieutenant Governor: Charlie Baker/Karyn Polito

My vote is more about how Martha Coakley is a truly evil - and I do not use the term lightly - person than anything else (although I do like Baker). Dorothy Rabinowitz provides a short summary of her 1990s-early 2000s reporting on the Fells Acres Day Care/Amirault family case here.

The long and short of it is that during the "Satanic ritual abuse"/hypnosis/"recovered memory" hysteria, in 1986, the Amirault family, proprietors of Fells Acres Day Care, were alleged by "recovered memory" specialists to have repeatedly sodomized children with assorted sharp household implements (healing the wounds with their supernatural Satanist powers), while in a "magic room" of the day care that didn't exist, while dressed in clown suits, while sacrificing animals.

The elderly matriarch, Violet, was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison, as was her daughter Cheryl, while son Gerald was sentenced to 40. By the 1990s, thanks in large part to Rabinowitz's reporting, it was obvious to anyone that the Amiraults were innocent, including the Massachusetts Parole Board (which is one of the least lenient in the country). However, Coakley used her position as Middlesex District Attorney to prevent the Amiraults' release; Violet died in prison, while she managed to prevent Cheryl's release until 1999 and Gerald's until 2004, simply because Coakley thought it would be politically advantageous to her. (When Cheryl and Gerald were finally paroled, Coakley applied the condition that they be forbidden from speaking publicly about the case!)

This isn't a isolated incident, either, when Kenny Waters was proven not to have committed the murder he was accused of, Coakley fought tooth and nail to prevent his release. There was a movie made about the case, Conviction, starring Hillary Swank; suffice it to say that it, rightly, does not put Martha Coakley in a positive light.

Senate: Brian Herr

Herr's a fairly inoffensive candidate who supports gay rights; Markey will win so this vote doesn't matter.

Attorney General: John Miller

Healey throws me absolutely no bones that would make me want to vote for her (she's against marijuana legalization, so that's out), so that leaves the platform she's running on of suing as many people who dare to do business in Massachusetts as possible (she got my vote in the primary because her opponent was even more extreme in this regard). She'll win, but I'm registering my displeasure by voting for the Republican in the race.

Treasurer: Mike Heffernan

The Democrat, Deb Goldberg, is the heiress to the "Stop & Shop" supermarket chain, and is trying to buy the position. She's also running a campaign based on lowest-common-denominator populism about how she's going to use the state pension funds as some sort of ATM machine slush fund to "invest" in politically-popular buzzwords X, Y, and Z, which strongly offends my sense of fiscal prudence in the non-political sense of the word.

I'm acquainted with Mike Heffernan personally, and think he's a good guy, and I also like his platform, which is focused on eliminating existing slush funds under the Treasurer's tutelage and giving the money back to towns in the form of local aid, and also that he'll refuse to sign off on the state's bizarre and reprehensibly wasteful plan to borrow $1 billion to expand the Boston Convention Center.

Auditor: Patricia Saint Aubin

If I were a hack focused solely on moving MA to the right, I'd actually be voting for Suzanne Bump, the Democrat. She's a ConservaDem who has mainly focused on investigating welfare fraud during her tenure, releasing several public reports to that effect and calling for welfare reform; the legislature has subsequently passed welfare reform legislation several times to vetoes by Gov. Patrick. Even if a Republican were to continue focusing on the same thing, it's unlikely that state house Democrats would act based on calls for welfare reform from a Republican auditor.

I'm voting for the Republican because Bump is unqualified for the position (she isn't a CPA), has poor personal judgement (she was delinquent on her taxes and had a convicted murderer on her campaign staff during the 2010 election when she was inexplicably first elected), and has had a messy scandal recently where a fired aide alleged that she used state resources for her campaign and protected officials in an audit of the Department of Children and Families as a quid pro quo for the SEIU endorsement.

Secretary of the Commonwealth: Bill Galvin

The 20-year incumbent. He has been pretty admirably competent and nonpartisan in the position; he hasn't interpreted election law creatively or pushed for dubious practices like all-vote-by-mail for partisan gain. He also seems to genuinely want to be the SoC rather than to use the position as a stepping-stone for higher office, which is a plus in my book. The Republican in the race is running on the moronic platform of allowing voting over the internet.