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Like thousands of other people (okay, twelve people), I went to the polls Tuesday and voted in the state elections in Maryland. We elect a governor in the off, non-presidential years, which gives more attention to the governor’s race, but also lets people run for the office without battling the passions of a national contest and all the hyper activity that brings.
We also elect state senators and delegates (representatives) every four years, plus the school board, plus the county government, plus the Democrat’s Central Committee, plus the sheriff for the county (pick whom you would most like to evict you), plus judges (most are unopposed) PLUS the county council, both at large and by districts. Did I miss anything? Oh, the Registrar of Wills. Why is that an elective office in the first place?
Yes, I voted on Tuesday, so shoot me. Here I am in the middle of one of the most media overloaded places in the world and I wasn’t fully informed about these races. Of course, I’d like to think, as a person who is media savvy and one who has spent most of my life reporting and writing, that I was full up with knowledge when I went to vote, but, truth be told, I wasn’t. On some offices, I just refrained from voting rather than click on a fully ignorant choice (as opposed to partially ignorant one).
Our elections, not just here, are something of a farce, which is one reason professional string pullers and liars like Karl Rove make so much money. Most of us don’t have the time, and maybe the energy, to really get up to speed on every contest. There are too many races and, frankly, does it matter all that much whom we select as our delegates? Yes, sometimes, but, most of the time they are just another cog in the machinery of government.
We voters wallow in ignorance and call it wisdom. There is a story this morning that voters in Ohio don’t blame George W. all that much for the economic mess. Of course not. If they blamed him, they’d have to blame themselves, because they put him back in office for an additional four years. Where does the voter turn when it was he who made the mistake? Blame everyone. Start a Tea Party.
Newspapers, magazines, television news and what’s left of radio news have abandoned their prior role of helping us to be informed citizens. In the case of these off-year elections, there are too many races to provide detailed coverage, but couldn’t a massive newspaper like the WashPost, with its suburban subsidiaries, give at least one or two shots of coverage to the bigger races, like state senate? Apparently not.
Voters in big, media saturated markets are served less well than small towns, because, in big cities, even an election for Congress is usually no big deal to the media. The local television stations don’t really care, don’t understand what is important and what’s not and satisfy themselves by giving a once over brush to the biggest, most contested races.
What, I ask, is a voter to do? I don’t know. My approach is to simply get as far as I can into the races that I care about and hope to find some information, in time to make a decision, about the rest. A lot of people wind up voting for the person with the most yard signs or whose name sounds familiar. This is pathetic. The next time you curse what government is doing, remember how poorly your voting choices were made, okay? I will take my share of blame, if the issue is pressed.
THE THREE-FOR-ONE DEAL
We also have a strange method of electing delegates to the state House. Three are three delegates per legislative district. To be nominated by your party, all you need to do is be among the top three finishers. Since Maryland, and Montgomery county in particular, are heavily Democratic areas, if you get the nomination, you are on your way to Annapolis. In my district, 14, two of the top vote getters got 24 per cent of the vote. The other “winner” got considerably less than that. There is no runoff and no requirement that anyone get a majority. This is essentially an undemocratic way of sending a lot of mediocre people to represent us in state government. All you have to do is get a couple of thousand people to vote for you and you’ve got a pretty good part time job that pays 43,000 a year for the next four years (there are lots of job opportunities around here, otherwise almost everyone would be running and 43K is nowhere near enough for even a single person to live on in MoCo).
NO NEWS IS...NO NEWS
On the evening of the voting, I turned on WTOP all news radio and they were really hot to tell me about what happened in Delaware, but almost nothing about Montgomery County, Maryland. I can understand that. We’ve only got about a million people here and most of the money in the whole state, so, of course, who would want to bother with us? Mark Plotkin was filling up the air waves with his well informed, gaseous blabbing about Delaware and everywhere but here. He’s wearing me out, now that he’s been on TOP for more than a few years. I’d like to slap him sometimes, just to get him to shut up and stop trying to sound so knowledgeable. (I’d like to write “bitch slap him” because it is funny, but I don’t really think in those terms, even though such phrases are very popular right now.
There were a couple of friends running for the state senate, both in tight races and it was almost impossible to find out what was happening. I finally found a listing of ALL of the state races from all over the state on the Internet, but you had to scroll down through everything to find the needle in that big hay stack. Then, to get an update, you had to remember about how far down the race you wanted was on the scroll, otherwise you’d have to go through the list all over again. There was no order to the list, either by district numbers (who would have thought of that?) or by office being sought. This is dog food on a stick. Awful.
At 11, I tuned in WRC, the NBC affiliate here. They were giving a lot of space to the local elections. Maybe six or seven minutes. Wow. Then, they went into their formulaic, packaged nightly news and never returned to the elections. They could have given a few seconds to the biggest, most contested races, but it was clear they had no idea what those races might be or what else they should cover. They just glossed over it and moved on. I didn’t see every second of their newscast, but as I recall they didn’t yet have the story that the Mayor of DC was being defeated for re-election. They not only missed the small stories, they missed the big one, too.
There are dozens, even a few hundred, people in Montgomery county who would have liked to brief the local television stations on the elections before hand and helped to steer their coverage. As far as I know, WRC doesn’t know whom these people might be or whom to contact, so they just slapped a few headlines on the air and called it a newscast. What a waste.
If you want the public to pay attention to you, you’ve got to pay attention to the public. Thousands of people voted in Montgomery county, just as they did in DC and Prince Georges county and across Maryland. Most of those who were interested in what happened in the election went to bed not knowing. When they got up the next morning, they could get a few more details from the Washington Post, but not many. Oh, and the weekly paper, the Gazette, came out Wednesday afternoon. No voting results! Their story had been written, it seemed, before the polls closed Tuesday. They had no details, either. Wait till next week, suckers.
THE BOTTOM LINE
If people who sincerely want to stay informed and cast careful ballots can’t get enough information to do so, what does that say about democracy? It says, to me, that we are in trouble. It says that this is one big reason that politics was taken over by the consultants and other hired guns over the last three decades. The ideal election contest now is one in which a smooth talking candidate just says A, B or C, the public says “ahhhh” and goes and votes accordingly, then the slick power mungers do whatever they want behind closed doors. Give or take a few hundred million dollars and some attack television ads, that pretty much sums up our democracy these days. The people are consistently lied to, they lap up the lies like melting ice cream and everyone goes on their way.
We are lucky in Maryland, at least more so than other states. We have a “good government” mentality here and we demand more of those elected than most everywhere else. We expect government to work, at reasonable cost, and to address the major problems of the day. We don’t view all government at the enemy of everyone, nor do we insist, unlike states such as Texas, that everything any corporation would ever do in the name of competition is wonderful. Still, there are big holes, big problems in the system. One of them is called primary election day.
Doug Terry, 9.17.10
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