Local elections: Never underestimate the stupidity of an uninformed electorate

Yesterday was Election Day across the country.  Numerous ballot issues were up for a vote and a large number of local candidates were running for city, township, county, district, and state offices.  In Ohio the collective bargaining law was rejected by the same voters who voted against the individual mandate in ObamaCare.  So Ohio voters are ok with their continued march towards bankruptcy because of unsustainable public employee pension and healthcare benefits, but don’t you dare tell them they have to purchase a government mandated healthcare plan.  Does that make sense?  Well it gets worse.

How would you react to the following scenario?  An individual who is currently serving time in jail manages to get on a local ballot and runs for an office he or she has held for the previous 2 years and wins another 2 year term.  This scenario actually happened and when I questioned how this could happen I was told that many of the voters might not have realized the candidate was in jail.  Wow, talk about abdicating your basic responsibility as a voter to know who you are voting for.  These voters clearly had no clue when they cast their vote for this criminal and for me this is absolutely shameful.

We have a responsibility as citizens of this great country to know who our candidates are and where they stand on the issues.  We at least have a responsibility to KNOW if the candidate we support is in jail.  I mean the above scenario reaches a level of stupidity that I can’t even begin to break down.  It’s irresponsible to walk into a voting booth and cast your vote for a candidate you know very little about.  This happened in 2008 and we ended up with Obama and now we live in a nation that is hardly recognizable from the country we enjoyed three years ago.  My concern is if we can’t get the local elections right how can we be expected to get the national election right?  I mean candidates running for local offices are our neighbors, our friends, people we grew up with.  We should know these folks.  It only takes about 30 minutes from our busy schedules to conduct research on the person we’re supporting.  If we can’t even find the time to do this then the republic is in deep trouble.

The candidates running for local offices should be scrutinized the most.  After all these are the folks who will have the most impact on each of you.  These are your school board members, town council members, your sheriffs, your county commissioners, and so on.  They have the power to levy taxes on you, the power to decide the curriculum in your schools, and how the property next to you will be zoned.  Yes these are indeed the folks who will have more of a direct impact on your daily lives than the federal government does and yet we continue to vote name recognition over substance.  This needs to stop!  We need to become informed on the issues and not be swayed by smoke and mirror tactics.  When this happens we become a very dangerous thing to the status quo.  We become an informed voter.

Liberty forever, freedom for all!