A recent story in the Gazette caught my eye when it noted a rare hotly contested race for school board in the lovely city of Woodland Park, west of Colorado Springs. For many smaller cities and towns, school board elections tend to be, well, mostly ignored by folks. Often there are just enough candidates to fill out the slate and occasionally there aren’t even enough folks running to fill all the seats and someone needs to be appointed later. Such is not the case in Woodland Park, however. Up there, the “nonpartisan” school board election is generating a surprising amount of heat.

It seems there are two “slates” of candidates running against each other: a conservative slate that wants to get back to “traditional values, no indoctrination,” and other such GOP-ish dog whistles. The conservatives have each received a donation to their campaign from the local Republican Party of $500, which is a pretty big chunk of change for a relatively small election. Woodland Park’s school district is home to just under 16,000 folks, though turnout in such elections is often much below the turnout of more prominent elections.

The “liberal” slate hasn’t gotten any such “group” donations, and their fundraising lags behind the conservatives, but again, in such hyper-local elections, money is less important though not unimportant. 

The conservatives are trotting out their usual anti-public-school rhetoric, blasting what one called the “palace guard for school professionals with little regard for parents.” You know, pushing that “big school” has an agenda to teach terrible and divisive things to your kids, like, for example, the actual history of race relations in our country, but I digress…

Teller County, home to the aforementioned Woodland Park, is a conservative county, and if I were a betting man, I’d guess that the slate of conservatives will win, and when in office will continue the blame-the-teachers efforts, because, you know, public schools are bad. Poor Thomas Jefferson, who felt that public schools were absolutely vital to ensuring liberty, must feel really stupid now.

Oddly, the whole point of my rant, I mean column, is not to attack the conservatives running. Heck, I actually admire the fact that such a large group of people are running for school boards, even if I differ with their views.

No, what I really want to call for is the end of these sham “nonpartisan” elections. We seem to think that for some offices, and school boards are a usual example, we should elect people on the basis of their ideas, and not their party. Well, that sounds good, but it is also nonsense. 

Having taught about political parties at the Air Force Academy for many years, please forgive my leaping yet again atop my rickety soapbox of idealism to say that there is no such thing as a nonpartisan election. If, for example, you have a slate of four folks, all of whom get identical donations from the county GOP, it’s pretty clear that those folks are aligned with the GOP point of view. Remember please that political parties do not change peoples’ thinking on issues. Rather, people with similar beliefs choose to join the political party that best matches their world view. Political party membership, therefore, is a useful, if not exact, metric of one’s point of view.

So how about we stop pretending that school board elections are non-partisan? Let’s run as either a Dem, a GOPer, an independent, or as a person from some other party. One of the values of political parties is that they help regular folks, who generally don’t pay attention to elections very much, to organize their thinking about whom to vote for. A GOPer in Teller County, for example, might do the leg work to figure out which of the seven people in total running are in line with his or her thinking, or he/she might just decide to skip it, rather than put in the effort. But if the slate of four (which, by the way, would be a good name for a band) were labeled as “GOP” on the ballot, that voter can make a reasonably informed inference about whom he or she will vote. Same thing for the Dems and others.

Look, maybe, just maybe, we should keep nonpartisan elections for judges. But as long as I brought it up, let me state that we should never vote for judges anyway. The average voter does not have the legal framework from which to make informed decisions about what judicial candidate merits his or her vote. A few years back, then-Gov. Ritter appointed me to the judicial review commission for my area, which included El Paso and Teller Counties. Our job, as a committee, was to interview every judge on the ballot, deep dive into their records, and then we wrote the parts about the judges in that famous blue book that gets mailed to every voter. 

We, as a commission, had the expertise and the time to really do a thorough examination of the candidates’ qualifications and record, and the voters virtually always went with the recommendations we included in the blue book for retaining or firing the various judges. Regular folks (like me now) shouldn’t be voting on judges anyway. Judges should be appointed and then reviewed, as we see in the federal system. Does anyone really think justice would be improved if, for example, we voted for who gets to be on the US Supreme Court every couple of years? 

But other than judges — maybe — I suggest we stop this silliness of pretending that nonpartisan elections are, in fact, nonpartisan. Let’s let political parties do one of the actual functions they are supposed to do and let’s run candidates for nearly every office under a partisan banner. It’s common sense, really, and would likely make elections more transparent and more folks would cast down-ballot votes. 

This has been a nonpartisan announcement (OK, not really).