Picture me, at my desk, heaving a deep, resigned sigh.

Here’s who’s on the ballot:

LaTrisha Vetaw (DFL-endorsed, incumbent)
Angela Williams (Republican)
Marvina Haynes (DFL)
Leslie Davis (No Vax. That’s what he put for his party: NO VAX.)

So yeah, I’m not a fan of LaTrisha Vetaw; she loves cops and landlords and is solidly one of Jacob Frey’s besties on the City Council.

Angela Williams is a Republican. Her Facebook page includes a bitter complaint about kids in the US learning Spanish as well as a lot of transphobia. Her main site is mostly about how LaTrisha doesn’t love cops enough.

Leslie Davis thinks that COVID is a hoax, that EMF waves degrade oxygen in the atmosphere, and that both masks and vaccines are bad. When he ran in 2021 he at least had a few positions specific to local governance but I couldn’t find any this year.

Marvina Haynes has a website I would describe as “half-assed.” (For example, she used a website template with a “book online” link and the link is still active although if you click it it tells you that there’s nothing to book right now.) Her positions are as follows: she wants “stable rent and stable property taxes” (so I assume that means that unlike LaTrisha, she’s in favor of rent control, although honestly I’m not sure); she wants the city to fix potholes; and she “will advocate for the safety and security of all community members and their families.” That’s a thoroughly content-free statement: everyone running wants the “safety and security of all community members and their families,” what differs is what they think the solutions are that will provide that. (Leslie, for example, thinks that getting rid of vaccines is key. Don’t vote for Leslie.) In particular, there’s really no clarity here on whether she thinks the solution is spending more money on cops.

Which is weird, honestly, because when I looked her up on Facebook, I found a page devoted pretty single-mindedly to getting the conviction of her brother, Marvin Haynes, overturned. Unicorn Riot did a series on Marvin’s conviction, and it’s worth reading, but let me just note that much like the Innocence Project, I am convinced that he’s not the one who did the crime. Given that her brother’s false conviction, and prison reform more generally, are so central to her life, I find it really startling that there is nothing about this on her campaign website. (This was so odd I sent her an e-mail at her campaign address asking her if the FB page was her, or if there was another Marvina Haynes? She did not reply, but did link to her campaign page from her FB page a few days later.)

Anyway, I am on her side regarding her brother, and I hope that Mary Moriarty, someone I supported in part because of her commitment to reconsidering bad past convictions, steps up here. But nothing about her campaign web page makes me think she’s even spent much time thinking about what the job of City Council rep entails.

If I were worried about the antivax guy or the Republican beating LaTrisha I’d vote for her as a lesser evil, but since I’m not worried about that, I would probably either cast a protest vote for Marvina just to express an objection to LaTrisha or I’d stay home.

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I have a book coming out this fall, in November! Liberty’s Daughter is near-future SF about a teenage girl on a libertarian seastead. A lot of it was originally published as short fiction in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. You can pre-order it in either book or ebook format from whatever you like.

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