I thought about filing to run for a seat on the school board. Can’t do it, Guilford County Board of Elections Director Charlie Collicutt told me Monday.
“You will not be able to file as a partisan candidate,” he said.
I didn’t want to file as a partisan candidate. I’m unaffiliated — one of 85,874 unaffiliated voters in Guilford County.
We unaffiliated voters, or independents, account for 25.5 percent of the Guilford County electorate. We are rapidly catching up with Republicans, who are just ahead of us at 27.1 percent. But there’s a big difference in how we’re treated by our election laws.
Before state Sen. Trudy Wade (R-Guilford) rammed a bill through the legislature changing Greensboro City Council elections, she gave us partisan elections for the Guilford County Board of Education. All the Republican legislators representing Guilford County supported her — over the protests of school board members themselves.
Beginning next year, school board candidates will run in the same gerrymandered districts that were implemented for county commissioners, and they can file to run only as Democrats, Republicans or Libertarians.
Usually when I write about redistricting and gerrymandering outrages committed by the Republican legislature, partisans cry that Democrats did it, too. Usually I agree.
But Democrats didn’t do this. They never mandated partisan elections for the school board.
The school board, unlike the Board of Commissioners, wasn’t considered a political body. Republicans apparently think it is, and they’ve engineered voting districts in an obvious attempt to take control of it.
Good luck with that. My concern is that this effort to gain partisan advantage led Republicans to effectively shut out one-fourth of registered voters from running for a seat. Unless a candidate is affiliated with one of the three recognized parties, he or she cannot sign up to run during the December filing period.
The deadline for affiliating with a party in time to file was Oct. 7. One school board member, Ed Price, just beat the deadline. He has served as unaffiliated; now he is a registered Republican.
Unaffiliated candidates can get on the ballot by petition. I would have to gather the signatures of 4 percent of the registered voters living in my district. This would be 1,608 people. That’s not an insurmountable number, but it does present a barrier that Democrats and Republicans don’t have to overcome. And because my district, District 2, is a geographic monstrosity that meanders all over the southern part of Guilford County, just locating its residents isn’t easy.
Partisan elections that don’t need to be partisan cost our state a lot of talent. For example, when state Treasurer Janet Cowell announced earlier this month that she won’t seek re-election, several qualified individuals were mentioned in the press as possible candidates.
Two — N.C. State economics professor Michael Walden and N.C. Budget Director Lee Roberts — have a problem, however.
They’re unaffiliated. Cowell made her announcement after the Oct. 7 deadline.
Walden told me Monday he was “not fully aware” of the registration deadline when he expressed interest. “That changed the calculus quite dramatically.”
Getting on the ballot for a statewide office as an independent requires nearly 90,000 signatures, according to a formula based on the turnout in the last gubernatorial election.
While he hasn’t “totally ruled out” a run, Walden added, “that is a major obstacle.”
Roberts was succinct in an email Monday: “I have been gratified by all the support and encouragement but don’t plan to run,” he wrote.
Both Walden and Roberts would make excellent candidates, if they could only get on the ballot.
Why should they be denied? What is it about the treasurer’s job — basically investing state pension funds and securing the state’s good credit — that has to do with being a Democrat or Republican?
Absolutely nothing.
Sure, we can’t have a hundred independent candidates running for a single office. Party candidates are thinned out in primaries. So let’s have independent primaries, with one winner earning a place in the general election against the party nominees. That would give everyone equal access to the ballot.
More importantly, it would give voters more and better choices. After all, many voters are unaffiliated because they don’t want to be Democrats or Republicans. It should follow that they don’t want to vote for Democrats or Republicans. They deserve real alternatives, especially when partisan labels just don’t matter.
