Letters to the Editor: Cartoon captures texting problem nicely; missing names on voting rolls cause concern

Re: Bert Ring’s cartoon (May 12-13) panning texting while driving and pedestrians texting while crossing the street (aside from the problem of car windows being overly tinted):

If our politicians really wanted an effective deterrence against such unsafe, behind-the-wheel behavior, they’d allow automobile insurance companies to be able to raise their insurance rates on drivers convicted of cellphone and/or texting violations.

Well, Senate Bill 1030, scheduled to be voted on in the Assembly Transportation Committee on June 11, would indeed make it a one-point DMV violation. Now, the state of New York already requires the assignment of five points upon conviction for such violations.

Albeit, the cartoon’s depicted pedestrian could well wind up paying the greatest price of all for her cavalierly dangerous mistake in judgment. (In Honolulu, this, too, has already been made illegal, but only on a fine basis.)

By the way, another related California state law “proposal” (one from yours truly) would allow drivers who are held to be “at fault” in a vehicular-bodily injury accident — say, where the bumper of your car “barely tapped” another moving vehicle’s rear end — access to the names and/or business addresses of the “treating physician,” who purportedly treated a resultant, so-called “soft tissue injury.”

This latter law could be important too, because If it turned out that the good doctor had ever had his or her license suspended or revoked, the case could well be thrown out of court.

Harvey Pearson

Los Feliz

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We are two of the nearly 119,000 Californians whose names did not appear on the voting roll when we went to cast our ballots on June 5.

At first, we were upset and baffled, but the poll worker at our table told us the same thing had happened to her and a number of other voters. We filled out provisional ballots, hoping our votes would count. TV news that night reported that the county election commission blamed a “printing error,” saying it would be investigated and that all provisional ballots would, in fact, be counted. We certainly hope so, and we certainly hope that the problem won’t arise again on Nov. 6.

Now we wonder just how many of the “disappeared” are, like us, registered Democrats, and we wouldn’t be surprised to hear that the anti-California Trump administration and its alleged Russian collusion had something to do with it. Sadly, these days such a scenario isn’t beyond mere speculation.

Jean and Tom Stapleton

Glendale