Elections, the alphabet and more memories

The impact of this day is so important that it has a name — Ballot Order Effects — and all states have laws that mandate the order in which candidates appear on the ballot.

I’m sure the Elections Office never considered, or even if it had considered, never cared that having a full cycle of ballot and bond measures every four years using the same naming convention every single time is extremely confusing from a search engine optimization standpoint. If you type into your web browser’s search bar any letter — say “Measure X” — you’ll get results from multiple elections because existing campaign websites from prior elections have already done the hard work of generating the domain authority that gets you showing up in search engine results pages on page one.

It definitely wasn’t on anyone’s mind in Sacramento when this legislation was passed in 1975 since none of this existed back then.

The other quirky thing about elections having repeating letters in the alphabet is that people have distinct memories tied to ballot measures that are completely different. For instance, the city of San Mateo’s housing ballot measure got the letter “T” and as I was researching other Measure Ts, I found one other from many elections ago had also touched my family. Measure T was on the 1996 ballot to approve building a tunnel at Devil’s Slide connecting Pacifica and Montara. 

As some of you might remember, the Devil’s Slide “sliding” problem was a decades-long challenge for the coastside where, since opening to drivers in 1936, it experienced multiple major landslides over the years. The 1995 landslide in particular, which closed that stretch of  Highway 1 for six months and turned a 25-minute commute into on some days a two-hour one-way slog, stays seared in my memory because that was when my dad was a field engineer with Caltrans and was assigned to that project to help design and install monitoring systems to understand how much the earth was actually shifting. 

I remember this one time I was sitting at the dinner table doing homework pretty late when he had to go on-site during a heavy storm to help fix something that was damaged by the winds. Dad took this gigantic thermos of hot water and had layers of jackets on because anyone who has been on the coastline in the middle of the night knows that no matter what the thermostat says, it still somehow feels colder than a winter’s night in Minneapolis.  

When I called my dad to ask him about that time, memories were in moments and not details — a lot happens in nearly 30 years. He recalled when the monitoring system was done, news crews came out and asked him to show them how it worked. And he remembered that there were always a lot of people in the mix — those who wanted a bypass or who wanted a tunnel, as well as those who seemed to not care how it got fixed but simply that it was fixed fast. The tunnel ended up being an acceptable compromise for many as momentum built in support of this as a viable alternative to paving a road through a state park. On Election Day the following year after endless volunteer hours were put in, Measure T passed with 74% of the vote authorizing construction of what is now called the Tom Lantos Tunnel. 

Now, 10 years after the Tom Lantos tunnel has opened, it’s celebrated as a modern engineering marvel as the second and third longest tunnel in California. My kids can just barely hold their breath long enough to get that wish in. And that old landslide-plagued stretch of Highway 1 that I used to love driving down because you were literally on the edge of the continent? A beautiful hiking trail that curves around the softened edges of our country.

Annie Tsai is chief operating officer at Interact (tryinteract.com), early stage investor and advisor with The House Fund (thehouse.fund), and a member of the San Mateo County Housing and Community Development Committee. Find Annie on Twitter @meannie.