9th Middlesex district State Rep; progressive tackiness

So I was trying to do some research for the upcoming State Rep election. There are currently three candidates for the 9th Middlesex district covering precincts in Waltham and Lexington: Tom Stanley (the incumbent, who just won the runoff against fellow Democrat, Kathleen McMenimen), Jill Stein (Green Party) and Linda Fosburg (Republican).

I like Jill Stein, and I think she, like many other third party candidates, was probably being too ambitious shooting for the top executive position in the state without any prior experience as an elected official. (Although the same really can be said for Romney, who I'm NOT keen on.) But anyway, I think running for State representative is a good step. Start small, as they say.

However, I'd hate to vote for her only to help take away enough votes from the incumbent Democrat to allow a Republican candidate take the seat. Especially after the anti-gay-marriage fiasco that went down at this year's constitutional convention, I would hate to lose any more ground; not to mention that Stanley deserves due credit and praise for standing up against House Speaker Finneran, who is living proof that a Democrat can be an agent of Evil. Sadly, that's about all that I've been able to find going for him -- his legislative record is marginal and he has the demeanor of a stereotypical old-school Massachusetts politician.

Anyway, through my web search, I found this article on Ken Sain's website which seems to attempt to dismiss the worries about the republican candidate:

Stanley has held this seat since 2000 and ran unopposed in 2002. He faced a primary challenge from a local politician with considerable name recognition on Tuesday and won easily. Stanley earned 10,504 votes in the 2002 election, meaning it may only take 6,000 votes to win this seat. [. . .]

Fosburg is not much of a factor. News accounts there say she's not mounting a serious campaign in this overwhelmingly Democratic district.

However, I'd probably feel better about it if I could find results of the 2000 election. Which I can't. So I'm still in a bit of a quandry over this.

Through this exercise, I was also trying to get more information about the individual candidates. There's basically nothing on Fosburg except a blurb I found that said she was hand-picked by Romney to run in this district -- not a ringing endorsement, but not much else, either. Tom's got his website.

For whatever reason, Jill's website (http://jill4rep.org) wasn't resolving when I tried to look it up yesterday (it seemed to come back sometime last night), so I started trying entering some other URLs hoping I'd get lucky and find another page. Second try, and sure enough, I found http://jillstein.org, which resolved to... the Unity Campaign, effectively an anti-Nader, unite-against-Bush site. I can certainly appreciate the sentiment. But I have to say, I find that having a URL based on the name of a local Green party candidate (in a non-battleground state) redirect to their site is just tacky. (And something the GOP was doing prior to the selection of John Edwards as the VP running mate. Not good company to be keeping. [sorry, I can't seem to find a link to any of the stories about it, or the offending URLs])