Trego's Mountain Ear

That is to say, that on the 20th of April, our Governor signed into law HB 536. This law amends the rules for write-in elections by removing section seven of the law regarding the declaration of intent for write-in candidates.

Section seven (of 13-10-211) is the last option to ensure a contested election, that is an election in which there is more than one candidate. An uncontested election is not an election in any way that matters– it is merely a rubber stamp.

Section seven is a written such that if there is no filed or declared candidate for a race in the primary, an undeclared write-in candidate is still eligible to be placed on the the official ballot in November. Had section seven been followed in our last election we would have had contested elections at the county level last November (the republican primary had a few races without candidates at the county level, and the democrat primary ballot was entirely blank at the county level).

Last year, after several email exchanges with the county election administrator (at the time, Paula Buff) we learned that she did not consider counting the write-in votes to be necessary.

Being rather appalled at the realization that anything written in on the appropriate blank was only an illusion of a vote, we contacted the secretary of state. The response was a form letter.

Now, we find that the state legislature has decided to codify Paula’s decision to ignore the law (something we suspect was happening throughout the state). Surely, removing a law designed to safeguard our elections and ensure that voters actually have a choice at the ballot box would be a highly contested issue? Something that passed by a narrow margin?

There were precisely four votes against it. In the House: Frank Smith, Katie Sullivan and Zoe Zephyr, all democrats. In the Senate: Brad Molnar, a republican. The vast majority of both the house and the senate thought removing this last chance at ensuring real elections was a good idea. We note that no one from Lincoln County is among those four votes. We remarked previously that Zephyr won a contested election to become a representative, though that was not the case for 31% of the House.

While it was the case that section seven was no longer functioning as a safeguard, since election administrators were allowed to ignore it, removing it rather than repairing it seems to be a rather bad decision.

It begs the question: What exactly are they going to replace our safeguard with? If the answer is nothing, then we have moved one step further away from representative democracy.