Uncontested elections a sham

lewleadbeater.com

notes from the edge

Home

Email Me

				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Uncontested elections a sham				November 8, 2003

There is something incredibly wrong with a political system that has become so atrophied that almost 50% of the legislative and other races in the state went uncontested in Tuesday’s election.

In our local elections, school board candidates from Stonehouse and Roberts districts got a free ride, as did Commonwealth’s Attorney Mike McGinty, Sheriff Bob Deeds and Treasurer Ann Davis. In fact, I was so frustrated with the whole uncontested mess that I wrote in Rusty Carter’s name for Sheriff, Richard Bradshaw’s for Treasurer and “any Democrat” for Commonwealth’s Attorney.

It’s not that I dislike Sheriff Bob Deeds, nor do I think he’s done a lousy job as top gun of the brown suits. On the other hand, I’m really not quite sure what he does, which leads me to believe that Carter could do it just as well. In addition, Carter, already a deputy editor, is a man of letters. He writes a helluva good column and is well versed in the fine art of slam dunking the simple-minded sportive delinquents who think he’s got a volleyball between his ears.

Same with Ann Davis. I have no idea what she does with all the tax money I send her, if she does anything with it at all. We can only hope that she’s not socking it away in some funky bank account that earns .0001% interest. I do know, however, that she got ticked off at Richard Bradshaw and wrote a rather sour letter to the Gazette in opposition to his candidacy for Commissioner of the Revenue. So, I figured that Bradshaw would be an excellent candidate to run against Davis, since he evidently knows something about money and was poles apart from Davis on the collegiality scale. Furthermore, if Bradshaw had won both races, we could have saved ourselves a bundle by combining two offices whose functions are dubious at best.

And then there’s our resident judicial chameleon, Mike McGinty. McGinty, you recall, decided to hop on over to the Republicans when the wizards on the right convinced him that there was no way he could become a Supreme Court justice if he continued his pillow talks with the hapless Democrats. How poetically just it would have been, then, if he, like George Bush in a recent poll, had been given a run for his money by “any Democrat.”

As for the school board, anyone who has the guts to serve in that roost of renegades is fine with me. Generally considered by its members to be an entity unto itself, the board has made hash of public opinion insofar as the third high is concerned and is rushing headlong to complete a project yet to be approved by the voters. Hence Ron Vaught has my sympathy and got my vote.

To be sure, all my write-in votes were an exercise in psychic futility. Not only will Deeds, Davis and McGinty slither back into office unsullied by campaign blood, but close to half of the same old warthogs will be getting yet another free ticket to the state legislature. Add to this the number of incumbents who won, and you’ll see that the sludge is once again backing up in the sewers of Richmond.

As a result, expectations for meaningful legislative progress are abysmally low. If the machinations of the last session are any indication of what will go on this time, expect more bills related to abortion, sodomy and sexual behavior than legislation dealing with tax reform.

And rather than movement in the area of funding public and higher education, look for further attempts to get the Ten Commandments into public buildings and publicly funded vouchers into the hands of those who want to send their kids to private religious schools.

Whereas transportation, mental health and Medicaid issues will stagnate, concealed weaponry will flourish. Discussions of scores of specialized license plates will overshadow debate on pressing environmental concerns.

And for all their pandering to the concept of smaller government, the Republican majority will still cling like Velcro to the antiquated Dillon Rule and leave localities scrambling to somehow fulfill Richmond’s unfunded mandates with yet higher real estate taxes.

How long all this will go on is hard to say. But as long as the juggernaut that is the present redistricting process rolls along, the less chance there will be for voters to oust the entrenched ideologues and fat cats whose primary interests lie in their own egos and the maintenance of their power through the suppression of opposition.

If we insist on making offices such as that of Sheriff, Treasurer or Commonwealth’s Attorney elective, we should at least give the voters the option of voting Yes or No when the races are uncontested. Without choice, the democratic principle behind such elections is a sham, and we might just as well allow these offices to become appointive.

As for state offices, it’s undoubtedly time for Virginia, as some other states have already done, to turn over the redistricting process to an unbiased panel of professional demographers. Perhaps then we could evict the unopposed woodchucks from their burrows and infuse the legislative debate with something that rises above the banal.