What is your biggest expense? Food? Clothing? Shelter? Transportation? How about TAXES?

Think about all the taxes we pay: income taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, sales taxes,… Here are a couple of lists:

• A List Of 97 Taxes Americans Pay Every Year (zerohedge.com).
• List of 100 Taxes and Fees You Pay to the Government (balancedpolitics.org)

We hope our leaders will make good laws and protect our rights, but we know for certain they will spend a lot of money.

We have an election on November 5, 2019. Do you know who will be on your ballot? Most of us don’t. Nevertheless, when it comes time to vote we will be making an important decision, one we won’t be able to undo for at least four years.

When we vote we make a big decision, and we often don’t know what we should know. That is why the subject of this post is a pig in a poke. Would you buy a pig in a poke? You probably think not, but we do it all the time. That’s why that expression, “a pig in a poke,” has remained with us since about 1555. Even though almost no one uses the word “poke” any more, because we still warn each other not to buy a pig in a poke, the use of the word “poke” to mean a small sack survives.

So what can we do to make an informed decision on November 5, 2019?

• Before we vote we can check out our ballot. We can see who and what is only it. We can visit pwcvotes.com. We can check out the November Ballot. Because we are electing the General Assembly, the Commonwealth’s Attorney, the Sheriff, the Board of County Supervisors, the School Board, and the Soil & Water Directors for Prince William County; the ballot is a complex mess, and the Office of Elections has had to produce a slew of different ballots for different parts of the county. If that was not bad enough, the ballot also includes two county ballot initiatives.
• We can investigate the candidates. We need to know about the candidates: their records and political positions.
• We can investigate the ballot initiatives. Are the proposed roads and park facilities something that the county should be building? Are they for greedy developers or the citizens of our county?

How can the Prince William and Manassas Family Alliance (PWMFA) help?

• We do voter education. Here is an example. Note again the November Ballot. The November Ballot actually contains over 40 different ballots. To know which ballot is your ballot, you need to determine your Magisterial District, State Senate District, and House District. You can find out which districts you reside in at pwcvotes.com. pwcvotes.com will send you to the Virginia Department of Elections to check out your voter registration. Your registration information includes your voting precinct and the districts you vote in. Once you have that information, you can look for a code located in the upper right corner of each ballot that looks like this: PWC BS13H13. That code represents Prince William County, the Brentsville Magisterial District, Senate District 13, and House of Delegates District 13.
• We question the candidates and publish their positions, and we are in the process now. Here are copies of our letters to the School Board candidates and the Commonwealth’s Attorney candidates and the questionnaires we want them to answer: PWMFA school board survey transmittal letter 2019 — 2019 School Board Questionnaire and PWMFA Commonwealth Attorney survey transmittal letter 2019 — 2019 Commonwealth’s Attorney Questionnaire.

We send questionnaires to candidates and request that they answer our questionnaires so that we can construct voter guides and distribute these voter guides to local area Christian Churches.

How can you help? You can contact the candidates and ask them to fill out our questionnaires. You can also help us with the cost of printing. To cover the costs for printing voter guides for the 2019 local elections and to inform citizens about the radical sex education agenda in our public schools, we are hosting a dinner. Please consider attending our 2019 Fall Fundraiser on September 28, 2019.

FYI: Here is the 2014 version of this post, WOULD YOU BUY PIG IN A POKE?