Public Eye

Random thoughts at noon on Super Tuesday:

Around 8 o'clock this morning, KPCC's morning anchor Steve Julian asked reporter Brooke Binkowski, in the field at a polling place that she described as being near Caltech in Pasadena, if there were big crowds of voters.

No one's here, she said. Maybe the students are all still in class.

I had to laugh. Caltech students, never a high-propensity group of voters in the first place, are far more likely to be still asleep at 8 than they are to be in class. What time would that class have started -- 7? Most of the voters in that tony residential neighborhood are more likely lawyers and brokers in downtown L.A. They voted absentee. Which means that some of them voted -- as my colleague Steve Scauzillo says, as if it were some contest to see who could vote first -- for candidates no longer in the race, including Rudy Giuliani and John Edwards.

At my polling place at the Linda Vista fire station, the turnout was huge. As I drove by at 7:30, I could see a line inside. As I came back at 8:15 to cast my ballot, I found out one reason why: the registrar combined two precincts there. So people who live in southern Linda Vista, and in the Annandale hills, were voting there instead of at the Rose Bowl Aquatics Center. Among those was Councilman Steve Madison, who I ran into as I was coming in and he was heading out. He's a Hillary man, it turns out. And he reports that, speaking of fire stations, longtime Pasadena political power broker John Tennant, the former head of the firefighters' union and then the state fire marshal, has moved back to town. Don't expect John to stay away from the local fray.

Inside, it was the LV Realtors running the show as usual -- Martha and Bill Denzel, Joe Wilson -- and two separate lines for the north and the south. The woman ahead of me in line had the problem I hear decline-to-staters are having all over California. "What party?" she was asked. "Independent," she said. "American Independent?" she was asked. Somehow, she didn't look like the type who was registered with the party based on keeping God in the Pledge of Allegiance, etc., not that there's much of a movement to take God out. "No," the woman said. "You know -- no party." It was finally figured out and she got a Democratic ballot since the Dems and, well, the American Independents do allow all comers to vote in their primaries, whereas the Reps, the Libertarians and I suppose the Greens do not welcome outsiders. At least she got a ballot -- it was reported on Larry Mantle's "Airtalk" later in the morning that some decliners are being told they can't vote in any party's primary.

It's going to be a fun night. Against the easy-to-hack electronic vote as I am, I'm prepared to wait till morning for the results, which in paper-ballot California with a huge turnout will take a long time. We've got time.

I suppose the pollsters will be right and it will be Clinton, but there ain't no real polling on Pasadena's Measure D. The infamous telephone tax only needs 50 percent plus 1. But I predict that thanks to City Hall staff bungling and the effective No campaign, which got a huge influx of cash at the last minute and got scary postcards out to at least frequent voters in Monday's mail -- "Need to text your kids? You'll get taxed" -- Measure D will fail. As it should.