Getting started in the middle

I'm a permanent absentee voter and have voted absentee in CA for 10 years or more.  I figured it gave me a better way to figure out my votes than walking up to the ballot box and figuring it out there.  Seems like I wasn't bright enough to realize even voting at the booth I could research ahead of time.  But a reason that's still valid is that I can vote at my leisure, without having to take time away from work.
For the last few years I've used a spreadsheet to record my thinking and research as I go through my decision process.  I use the Internet to look at endorsements from major papers in CA and in my home burg of San Diego, and I've added those links to the spreadsheet along with tallies of the endorsements.  I find that the papers generally give reasonably well supported arguments for their endorsements, serving as a nice starting off point for my process.  They also give me background and context that don't exist in the Official Voter Guide.
I started tabulating and thinking about the myriad propositions in CA.  I see the allure of the proposition--an opportunity for direct democracy, for the voters to do something their elected representatives won't.  But I'm feeling more and more that the proposition process has run amok, has turned into micromanagement by an emotional and ill-informed electorate railroaded by selfish special interests (by the way, I'm not inherently against special interests, and I generally feel that the special interest name-calling is a specious attack that I ignore).  I came to see voting on the propositions a chore forced on me by these selfish groups and individuals.
But I still work my way through them.  And over the course of a few elections now, I've come to find that with all the arguments flying back and forth between the endorsements in the papers, most of those arguments are mere window-dressing rationalization for the endorsement.  For me, my decision often comes down to one reason.  And when I say "comes down to" that often encompasses working through a lot of issues before I find the one (or just a few) that decides it.
That leads me to my first purpose for this blog--to record my process of whittling down an issue to its crux deciding factor or factors.  And why does the title of this post suggest starting in the middle?  Because for the 11/2010 election, I've worked my way through most of the issues already.  So, I doubt I'll record much of my process this year.  But as the future is difficult to predict with accuracy, I'm a good bit curious to see where this heads to.
And as politics engenders strong opinions and debate, perhaps this blog will see some of that activity.  I vacillate between leaving the comment section wide open and moderating it to contain only what I think are cogent submissions (no ad hominem, please).  Once again, the best way to find out what the future holds is to travel there (kinda like the weather).