Elections slates didn't crowd the ballot

I'm writing this column the day before the election that will seat members to the Bigfork Land Use Advisory Committee, Bigfork Fire Department board of trustees and Flathead Valley Community College board of trustees. Across the lake in and around Lakeside, a similar slate of positions is being voted on.

And guess what? I can tell you how these boards will look tomorrow.

That's because the slates of candidates are so sparse — or not up for election because not enough people filed to warrant one — that it's a near mathematical certainty who will win.

It's proof of the old truism that 90 percent of life is just showing up.

Though four people filed for three vacant seats on BLUAC — Bigfork's highest level of local government — one threw his support behind another, making effectively only three candidates.

Two men are running for one seat on the Fire Department's board and the Bigfork School District Board didn't even hold elections because the number of candidates matched the number of seats.

The proverbial pickings are even slimmer across the water, where the Lakeside Community Council — their version of BLUAC — didn't have anyone file for its vacant seats.

Down in Lake County, some Dayton residents are infuriated that members of the Water and Sewer Board were appointed without an election, while others say appointments were needed to have bodies in the chairs.

With such sparsely populated ballots, it would seem that there's a general trend toward apathy in the area, and some people have made it clear they suspect just that.

But the phones at the Eagle aren't wanting for rings as concerned citizens call us up to question a group's decision or theorize as to what impropriety might be going on.

Sometimes those people are ones I see again and again in meetings, participating in the process even if they aren't running for a seat. But more often they're people who I've never talked to before, who only get involved in community policy when they're upset about a particular decision.

Not everyone has the time to run for a board or an office; some people have to have real jobs. But in a largely affluent community with a respectable population of retirees, there aren't a whole lot of excuses for vacant positions being filled by votes of affirmation instead of by counted ballots.

A community that doesn't get a choice on election day made its choice long before, when the filing deadlines passed without anyone showing up.

—Alex Strickland