Out of the Woods

About Elections

We recently hosted an event in support of one of the candidates for the local School Committee. This young person was born in Africa and came to the US as a child and went through the entire public school system in my town. She knew at first-hand what it was like to be a public school student in our town as a person of color. Since there had been a good deal of controversy recently about the treatment of African-American and Latinx students in our school system, run by white persons almost exclusively, supporting her campaign seemed important. Add to that, we came to like and respect her as we got to know her better.

Most of the members of our school committee have had their position for a long time. Their names are familiar but I have never met any of them and have a very hazy idea of any of them. I am not clear what they stand for when it comes to educational policy and I do not know them personally. I do not know to what extent to trust their campaign statements and whether one could rely on them to act on the principles they profess.

Well, you say, that's the way it is in a large country like ours. But that is of course totally beside the point. I have the same problem of not knowing what candidates I vote for in the town I live which is not a big town by any means. More importantly, we say that in our democracy the people have the ultimate power over the government and that they exercise that power by selecting representatives of their choice. But a population voting for representatives they often do not know and who are, in fact, different from the voters think they are does not strike me as a population that is in control of its government or society. The choices we make, most of the time, are rather sightless. Rather than making thoughtful, well-informed choices, we yank the lever of an electoral slot machine. Our choices tend to be pretty random.

Is there a way of remedying that problem? Suppose in each neighborhood where people know each other or live close enough together to meet and talk, the citizens meet to select someone who is familiar with the school committee and knows the persons who are running to join that committee. Perhaps that person was a member of the committee some time ago and thus knows the personalities of the current membership and the functioning of the body. Suppose further that each neighborhood selects one such person well able to make an informed choice with respect to members of the School Committee. The representatives of each neighborhood will meet and choose the requisite number of persons to serve on this committee. The committee membership is picked by persons who know each candidate and have some judgment as to who may be the best person to help the schools. In this way the problem of citizens voting for more or less unknown candidates has been circumvented.

You may object that this indirect vote for school committee members puts a great distance between the individual citizens and the organs of city government. But that distance exists already. There is a large gap between me and institutions whose members are elected but are on the whole unknown to the people who vote for them and therefore cannot really be said represent those people. If voters under our present system of direct elections of members of the School Board or the City Council wanted to be familiar with the persons they vote for, they would need to spend a great deal more time to meet the candidates at different forums or when they volunteered to work for a candidate or another. Most citizens do not have the time available.

Counting up the number of votes that different candidates get from voters that do not know them strikes me as an irrational way of electing a government. The jobs we elect people for are important. It makes a great deal of difference for us how well those jobs are done. We need the best candidates available. We don't get those as long as we respond to campaign literature written by professional campaign strategists that often are only faintly related to the ideas and practices of the candidate.

We need to elect persons as electors we know, whom we can trust that they will do what they promise us. That means we should choose persons in our neighborhood who are familiar with the office we are voting for and familiar with the candidates. They can choose the one who will do the best job for us.

This is, I believe, a good project. But Is it realistic? In many places in the United States citizens do not live in stable neighborhoods where neighbors know each other and are thus able to choose the right electors for local as well as national elections. Many neighborhoods are unstable in that people move in and out constantly. Think of neighborhoods with large student populations or neighborhoods of poor people who are regularly getting evicted because they are unable to pay the rent. In areas surrounding military installations, families move regularly when their members in the military are transferred. There are parts of many towns populated by young people on their way up who will leave when they get promoted and their pay goes up. Others leave because they lose their job in times of economic instability. In short, the picture of areas with stable populations does not seem to apply to significant parts of the country.

But many folks in these highly mobile populations may not participate in elections, especially not in local elections because their ties to the locality may be very weak. They may also remain aloof from elections because they do not feel at all included in the political system. Candidates do not seek them out or mentioned there needs and problems in their campaign speeches. Feeling overlooked by politicians they may well stay aside when elections come around.

Choosing the electors we do know instead of candidates we don't, is a realistic project that deserves serious consideration.