As Republicans took full advantage of their complete power in the General Assembly, look for numerous items slipped into bills that received no debate during the session to become law.
One allows the county commissioners in counties of more than 120,000 to abolish the bipartisan boards of voter registration with a unanimous vote and turn the duties over to the circuit court clerk, where the duties already lie in smaller counties. Marion and Lake counties are conveniently exempted, but not Allen. That means the three Republican commissioners can vote to turn voter registration over to fellow Republican Clerk Lisa Borgmann and fire the Democratic voter registration co-director, Deb Morrone.
All about turnout
Though a poll last week showed Liz Brown leading Paula Hughes for the Republican mayoral nomination, the lead of nearly seven percentage points was not enough to cover the margin of error and number of undecided voters.
More important, it doesn’t measure which campaign will do the better job of making sure supporters go to the polls. That requires organization, and Hughes seems to have bettered Brown on campaign organization.
In any event, given this is a an off-year, primary election, the Allen County Election board predicts only about 18 percent of the city’s 175,000 registered voters will show up at the polls.
Which party ballot?
One reason primaries don’t have better turnout is many independent voters are loath to identify themselves as members of either party.
Under state law, if you voted for more Democrats than Republicans in the last general election, you are supposed to vote Democratic. If you didn’t vote in the last election, you should plan to vote for more Republicans than Democrats this November if you want to vote in the GOP primary. (And vice versa, of course.)
But election officials don’t know who you voted for last time, much less who you plan to vote for next time. So the law is largely unenforceable and a matter of conscience.
Endorsement déjÀ vu
If you need evidence that local political races are more about good government than conservative vs. liberal ideology, look no further than the endorsements on the editorial pages of the city’s two newspapers.
Despite the very different editorial philosophies of the two newspapers, every candidate The Journal Gazette editorial page endorsed and The News-Sentinel “recommended” was the same. That’s the same 10 candidates out of a field of 21 for the city council nominations.
And both pages selected the same candidate in the highly competitive GOP mayoral primary. (Both also picked Tom Henry out of the five-candidate field for the Democratic mayoral nomination, but that was an obvious choice given the other candidates.)
While both papers have endorsed many of the same candidates before, I can’t remember a time when the choices were the same across the board.
Interesting that in this primary election, the two editorial boards looked at the candidates through very different lenses and came to the same independent conclusions about the best candidates.
