Election season is hard upon us. So the half of us who vote must once again endure “civic duty’ haranguing along with the half who don’t.
Personally, I’d just as soon people who need to be cajoled to the polls stay home and watch a “Friends” rerun instead.
Their political opinions are invariably ill-informed, if not nonexistent. And I‘d rather not be compelled to live with the results of their non-decision-making processes in electing candidates to public office based solely on shared ethnicity and/or gender, familiarity with a surname, or falling into a single, partisan column on the ballot.
The biennial browbeating is especially exasperating for we Wayne County travelers.
Festooning our highways and byways are enormous billboards bearing the exhortation “VOTE. Your key to change,” a clarion call to exercise our precious franchise courtesy of “Cathy M. Garrett, Wayne County Clerk.”
Now 55-mph passersby may be forgiven if they mistake this taxpayer-financed message for a candidate campaign sign since the most eye-catching element is the ingratiating visage of a politician currently seeking re-election.
And there is, after all, only a punctuated difference between
“Vote. Your key to change. Cathy M. Garrett, Wayne County Clerk”
and
“Vote your key to change: Cathy M. Garrett, Wayne County Clerk.”
Though a particularly clever example of the art, Ms. Garrett is certainly not unique in exploiting this opportunity to do well by doing good. Examples abound of taxpayer-financed (putatively) public service messages that just as prominently feature the public official messenger.
Wayne County Treasurer, Ray Wojtowicz, for another instance, had buses carrying giant signs reminding about property taxes a few weeks before the August primary.
These also conspicuously credited the treasurer himself for the advisory. Presumably, it was coincidental that the announcements endlessly traversing the area also happened to be in the same colors and style as Wojtowicz re-election signs.
It should also be noted that this incumbent perk/tactic is not the patented property of Wayne County Democrats. It wasn’t until our current secretary of state was elected that hundreds of branch office building signs throughout the state were modified to remove her Republican predecessor’s name.
Nor is it even the exclusive domain of politicians in partisan offices. Every video in the Dearborn Public Library collection, for instance, has a “Mayor Michael Guido” credit dubbed in before the titles.
These are the kinds of power-entrenching shenanigans that led voters a decade ago to add the incumbency control device of term limits to our state constitution.
Perhaps it’s time for the next phase in leveling the playing field between incumbents seeking reelection and challengers who don’t hold the high-profile ground.
What is needed is a new set of legal restrictions on elected officials’ opportunity to employ the power and resources of their office for self-promotion.
A simple, straightforward solution would be to limit the use of the particular officeholder’s name to materials that serve specifically for the duration of his or her term of office – and can be changed without inordinate trouble or expense when the office itself changes hands.
This would permit, for example, letterhead, directories, websites, and so forth. But it would bar such things as temporary, election-time exhortations to vote, pay taxes, etc., as well as permanent building signs and videotape modifications.
While we’re at it, let’s ban the use of photos altogether. These can’t be anything but self-aggrandizing for the professional ruling class. And of particular utility to those whose career path passes through the more bureaucratic offices.
Take the example of the county clerk’s “Vote. Your key to the future” billboards. How many voters even know exactly what a county clerk does? Let alone which candidate is most qualified to do it?
That is precisely why these billboards are so useful to the incumbent.
With the exception of party affiliation, they cover all three of the remaining criteria uninformed voters will actually use in casting their ballots. Having “Cathy M. Garret” in foot-high letters creates what campaign consultants call “name recognition.” The huge photo shows her to be a person of color. Both name and photo demonstrate that she is also a person of gender.
For the office of Wayne County Clerk that’s the re-election Triple Crown!
Under the circumstances, what hope does poor Lanell Buffington (the Republican candidate whose name, I’ll wager, you have never even heard, nor are likely to hear again between now and Election Day) have?
It’s no mystery why half of the electorate doesn’t bother to vote. The incumbents use taxpayer money and the power of their office to crush the already remote prospects of any challengers.
Most people figure they might as well stay home election night and see what Rachel and Monica are up to.
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More on elections:
- Wasting your vote
- Term Limits — A baby step in the right direction
- Democracy and Democrats
- Term Limits Redux
- Democracy in Detroit
- They say the Party’s over
- The limits of Term Limits
- Reforming campaign finance reform
- School millage fatigue
- King Edward of Wayne
- “None of the Above” for Governor
- Public Act 399 and the Michigan Legislation Factory
