They say hindsight’s 20-20, but when it comes to elections (and plenty of other things), I often wish foresight were too.
If voters could see the effect that even their one little ballot could have in how things play out in their communities, in their state, in the nation, I’ll bet we’d all take it a little more seriously.
I say this as one who has been guilty, at least in the past. You know, you pick up that ballot and there’s a candidate for such-and-such judgeship, or some board that, frankly, you’ve barely heard of. You could skip it, but as a good citizen who got off your duff to even vote, you feel the obligation to make your voice heard. So you fill in a bubble and go on your merry way.
Chances are, you probably didn’t make much of an impact with that choice. But you could have.
Some of us did last month in what turned out to be a really important race: Oregon state superintendent of schools.
I’ve been kicking myself ever since that race that we didn’t pay more attention to it in this newspaper. Granted, we really try to keep our focus on the local issues and candidates, especially from an editorial standpoint. We do make an effort to be sure our readers are aware of the various state measures, but we generally don’t tell you how we think you should vote on the candidates, especially at the state level.
In general, our philosophy on elections is that if we can tell you enough to make an informed decision, you can make that decision without us telling you what it should be.
However, I think we dropped the ball on the superintendent’s race.
And that became painfully clear to me as I watched challenger Ron Maurer come oh-so-close to bumping incumbent Susan Castillo out of another four years as head of our public schools.
If you haven’t been following the situation, Maurer lost the race by .36 percent €” 2,520 of the 700,746 votes cast in the statewide election. Castillo got 127 votes more than the minimum she had to have to avoid a run-off in November.
Castillo, a former Democratic legislator supported by the teachers’ union, won such Democratic strongholds as Multnomah, Lane and Benton counties. Maurer, a Republican state representative from Grants Pass, won the typically Republican counties in eastern and southern Oregon. But he also got more than a third of the votes in typically liberal Multnomah County.
Maurer decided to throw in the towel last week mostly because he couldn’t afford a statewide recount that might cost as much as $125,000. He spent a total of $74,000 on his campaign, while Castillo spent about $200,000. It’s easy to see why he decided a recount wasn’t worth it, particularly after Lane County election officials refused to undertake a recount of their ballots that Maurer argued were printed in such a way that a vote on one side could create dimples that could falsely indicate a vote for Castillo.
Looking back, I have to say that part of the problem with Maurer’s candidacy was that he didn’t do a good enough job of getting the word about himself out to voters. I really learned more about him from the voter’s guide I got from the state than I did from any other source, and that’s where he lost the race, I think.
Maurer is a fourth-generation Oregonian from Grants Pass, a graduate of Oregon State University (1985) with a bachelor’s degree in science education. He went on to earn master’s and doctor of education degrees. He’s been a state representative since 2006.
Castillo also has a college degree €“ in communication, from OSU. She was an award-winning television journalist and then went into politics after being appointed by Lane County commissioners to fill a vacant seat in the state senate. She was elected superintendent in 2002.
Without going into gory details, Castillo’s first two terms have not been without controversy, including losing a breach-of-contract lawsuit filed against a vendor and an accounting scandal in which an Oregon Department of Education employee was accused of embezzling nearly $1 million intended for charter schools, anti-drug youth initiatives and school-based health programs.
Critics have also accused Castillo of lack of leadership in improving Oregon’s public schools, which really haven’t made much progress since she took over. Castillo and the employee unions that have supported her have consistently argued that lack of money is the problem with Oregon’s educational system. But apparently, voters who were paying attention €“ and maybe many who weren’t €“ thought differently.
Think what would have happened if Maurer had had enough money to get his message out effectively in eastern Oregon, where Castillo did better, comparatively, than she did in, say, Multnomah County. To be honest, until a week or two before the ballots arrived, most of the exposure many voters had to Maurer’s campaign came in the form of his big signs along I-5 proclaiming “Dr. Ron for Superintendent.” Not enough.
OK, so we blew it.
But think how a few more votes could have made a difference in that election €” and in the future of our schools. After all, Dr. Ron does actually have some background in education and he comes from a slightly different political stripe than Castillo.
My original point in bringing this up is that you just never know how your vote might make a difference in an election.
Type the words “election ended in a tie” into Google and you’ll get approximately 3,500 results, including the presidential election of 1800 in which Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr tied.
A few years ago, an election in Waterloo was decided randomly €” after the candidates tied. I once covered a city about the size of Sweet Home where a municipal election ended in a tie vote for two candidates. Before my time, I’m told, Sweet Home has had initiative elections that came down to four votes.
We’ll do all we can to make sure our local voters know what they need to when it comes time to make decisions about elections. But the bottom line is that we all need to remember that, possibly when we least expect it, our vote really does count.