We have a fair number of people coming over on Saturday. That happens to be primary day, so I went down to my local satellite city hall and voted early. The State of Hawai'i uses the SAT-style forms and electronic scanners, although they're moving toward the touch-screen variety of voting machine (with paper trail). It was fairly painless, other than the mild confusion of having a Board of Education contest for a district fifteen miles away from me on my ballot. I asked about it and was told that my district's BOE seat wasn't up for election till 2008 because of staggered terms. There are three at-large seats up, and I have a right/obligation to vote for those, but why was I allowed to vote for a representative in the Windward District? Nobody knew.
Board of Education seats are non-compensated, so the people running for them are presumably dedicated folks, and the elections are theoretically non-partisan, so there's little danger of the loonies taking over the Board and trying to foist creationism on the munchkins. But, in part because they're non-partisan, there's very little money for advertising, so the people who win basically do so because of name recognition. It's very hard to learn just what any newcomer might have in mind should he/she be elected. Either you pin the list of candidates up on the wall and throw darts, or you hunt really hard to find the single article in each paper which offers you a paragraph about each one of them.
Ah well.
Posted by Linkmeister at September 20, 2006 02:26 PM | TrackBackDo you vote for judges in Hawaii? Those are the ones that I can never figure out what to do about. There's no coverage (unless they're on trial for kiddy porn, but that only happened once) of them, so it's a complete farce, pretending that I should be picking them. And it's a fairly important position to be picking people, that way. The closest I've come to a system is waiting for the local rag to endorse, and then voting for anybody but those endorsed. But that is a clearly flawed strategy.
Posted by: Andrew Shimmin at September 20, 2006 03:13 PMNo, judges are nominated by a commission (appointed by the State Senate, the State House, the Chief Justice and the Governor). Then the governor picks one from that list, and the Senate has to confirm or reject.
Good thing, too. I don't think members of the judiciary should be elected, with all the money campaigns cost these days. Seems to me there'd always be a perception of possible conflict of interest in judicial decisions involving campaign contributors.
Posted by: Linkmeister at September 20, 2006 03:24 PM