A few days before the primary election, I was reading an article in the Arizona Daily Sun about two candidates. I was reading the article slowly, trying to catch the nuances of each sentence. I hoped that somewhere in the article was the answer to a burning question: Which candidate should I vote for? But when I reached the end of the article, I still had not made up my mind. Fortunately, Lisa, my wife, was home at the time so I could ask her opinion.

“Should I vote for candidate X or candidate Y?”

My wife laughed. “Candidates X and Y are both Demopublicans,” she said. “We’re Republicrats, remember?”

“Oh yeah,” I said, smiling sheepishly. I knew that. I knew that as registered Republicrats, we can’t vote for Demopublicans. I had just forgotten, temporarily, that Mr. X and Mr. Y were Demopublicans.

Yes, it’s true, when it comes to our political system, I sometimes find it all a bit confusing. In fact, there have been times in my life when I have been so confused that I have passed up my right to vote. I believe that this problem is widespread, even among college graduates. Of course, our political system is not really that confusing if you take the time to figure it out. Actually, I have found that the easiest way to understand the process by which we elect our representatives is to ask your wife to explain it to you.

How is it that political illiteracy is so widespread in a country that prides itself on having a model democracy? Why is it that only about 58 percent of adults in Coconino County are registered to vote? Why is it that only about 31 percent of 45,230 registered voters in Coconino County voted in the primary? Why is it that out of an estimated 78,000 adults in Coconino County who are legally eligible to vote, only about14,000, (about 18 percent) actually voted? 

Can we blame an educational system that fails to teach the basics? In school, I don’t remember ever learning anything about how primary elections work. Of course, it has been a long time since high school, when I took a class in American government. I don’t remember much from that class, except for Jannine Marshall, a pretty girl who sat next to me. My only political concern at the time was how I was going to get Jannine to vote for me – preferably without having to actually talk to her.

Of course, even if you were taught how our representative democracy works, and even if you remember what you learned, you might choose not to vote. You might think that all politicians are equally bad – or equally good. You might think that things never seem to change no matter who is elected. You might think that so long as the economy remains strong, there is no need to vote. After all, the government and the country seem to be humming along just fine without your involvement. Isn’t a decision to stay away from the polls basically just a vote not to change things?

Of course, the answer is “no.” A decision to stay away from the polls is just a decision to let other people decide whether or not to change things. When the majority of people don’t vote, it becomes easier for relatively small numbers of people who do vote to call the shots. In local elections, races are often close and may ultimately be decided by just a few dozen voters. And of course, despite all of our cynical stereotypes about politicians, they are not all equally bad – or equally good.

Unfortunately, it is often difficult to see the differences between candidates, especially in local races where many candidates receive little or no media attention. To its credit, the Arizona Daily Sun did make an effort to cover all of the local primary races. But in many cases coverage was limited to providing a single profile of each candidate. And these profiles sometimes left a lot to be desired. Even after reading the profiles of some candidates for certain offices, I could not decide whom to vote for. Even my wife, with all her added IQ points, could not make a decision based on some of the short candidate profiles that appeared in the Sun.

It seems to me that part of the reason for the low turn out in local elections is a lack of information. It would have helped me to have had more information about some of the candidates in the primary. I would have liked to have read longer, more in-depth profiles of some of the candidates. Or better yet, two profiles of the same candidate by different writers who asked different questions of the candidates. 

It is this kind of additional information about local candidates that we hope to provide on a regular basis in the pages of Flagstaff Tea Party. Because of our small staff, and the small size of our publication, we were not able to provide coverage of the candidates in the primary. However, in this issue, you will find a voter’s guide that provides information about some of the local candidates who will face off in the Nov. 7 general election. With your financial support, we hope to grow into a publication that is able to provide more thorough coverage of local candidates prior to future elections.

So don’t forget to vote. It’s easier than you may think.

And as you prepare to cast your vote, don’t forget to cast a vote for Flagstaff Tea Party by making a tax-deductible donation. If we are ever going to make a real dent in the information gap, we must first make a real dent in our own budgetary gap. We can’t cover local elections the way they deserve to be covered until we can cover our costs. So vote for Flagstaff Tea Party. If you have any doubts about the wisdom of doing so, just ask your wife to explain things to you.