Soon to be former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger recently made news by saying that, "No one cares if you smoke a joint or not."

This is interesting considering the Hollywood actor turned governor of California signed a law five weeks ago that made possession of up to an ounce of marijuana the equivalent of a traffic ticket. It carries a penalty of no more than a 100 dollar fine and no arrest or criminal record. He defended the law in a TV interview, telling host Jay Leno on NBC television's Tonight Show it was a good idea.

Last week on election day, voters rejected a further initiative that would have allowed adults aged 21 and older to possess and grow small amounts of marijuana. Schwarzenegger told Leno that California's Prop. 19 law had, "gone too far," thus it was not approval by voters.

Exit Poll

On Tuesday our POL 312 class conducted our Exit Poll. It was a pretty exciting time considering we had spent a good amount of the semester preparing questions for the poll and helping eachother with ideas on question order, wording and other topics. Here is my recap of how the day went and some of our results. . .

As a class, we seemed to spent the majority of our time conducting the poll near the Milner Library and inside of the Bone Student Center. Considering the Bone was the polling place, it made sense that the majority of the people willing to take a poll about the elections would be in this central area. I personally was able to grab about 4-5 people in this area (all students) before moving to south campus and the College of Business. In the COB, I found that less people were informed that November 2nd was indeed election day. Even with little knowledge, I found another 5-6 people who were willing to take the poll and support our class results.

As a class, we ended up having 212 people take our poll. This was a fair number and we found the following interesting about our results.

-The majority of the people who took our poll were white in ethnicity and christian in religous faith

-The majority of those answers poll questions voted "democratic" and listed themselves as "liberal"

-The economy/jobs were listed as the primary concern on both a national and state level

-I found it interesting that some people (nearly 50%) said they still had trust with the governor position in Illinois

-Those who voted for Obama in the '08 election primarily voted Democrat once again. This differs from national research.

Overall, the exit poll was a success. The class worked cohesively to get a good number of results and form conclusions based on these results. Personally, this was the first major poll I have conducted. I found the process to be enjoyable and would be interested in conducting more exit polls in upcoming political elections.

Prop 19 is DEAD

Even though voters soundly rejected Proposition 19, cities around California managed to win approval for plans to tax marijuana. The measures were mostly contingent on Proposition 19 passing, so it's doubtful they will have much effect unless pot legalization backers make another stab at a ballot measure sometime in the future.

Many Latin American leaders are breathing a sigh of relief. They were worried that if Proposition 19 in California passed, making recreational marijuana use legal, the drug wars in their respective countries would grow.

Personally, I would have been interested in seeing what would come of Proposition 19 if it had passed. Marijuana is an issue that does not seem to be going away. I would expect the legalization of marijuana to continue to be on upcoming election ballots.