Polls in DuPage County will be open until 7 p.m., so be sure to head down to your local polling place and do your democracy proud. Chances are, you won’t run into any crowds.

Which leads me to a broader question…why do so few people vote in local races? Is it that people don’t know? Is it that people don’t care? Both?

It’s true that detailed information on local candidates is, shall we say, lacking. Most of the time, you can find out that someone is running from the board of elections, along with their address, which unless you’re planning to go knocking on each candidate’s door, it’s probably not going to do you too much good. Searching for information on Google can be hit or miss, because not all news outlets have their sites indexed. And even when a newspaper does have info about a local candidate, it’s probably a very, very small percentage of what you would need to feel “informed”. And if you are one of those determined citizens who make it out to a candidate forum, you’re not going to get much information there, depending on how long the forum is and how many candidates are present, you may not get too much info there.

In my local races, I had a few questions about some of the candidates, and I traded notes with several people, and even talked to some of the candidates directly. It’s the only way, most of the time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 9:50 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.