“Democracy Dies in Darkness” is the motto of a local, well, let’s be charitable and call it a news organization. And if that motto is to be taken literally, apparently darkness has descended on Arlington.
Nearly 99 percent of registered voters stayed home earlier this month when Arlington Democrats held a party caucus to select two endorsees for the School Board seats being vacated after the brief tenures of Cristina Diaz-Torres and David Priddy, the latest in a long line of School Board members to have thrown in the towel on the job.
Turnout of less than 1.5 percent was, frankly, sad. There will be other candidates in November, but the power of the Democratic sample ballot will carry all the Arlington County Democratic Committee’s candidates through to victory.
In other words, two of five (that’s 40%, at least by the old rules of math) School Board members, who collectively control an annual budget of roughly $700 million and determine policies that impact the educations of tens of thousands of students, will have been determined virtually under the radar.
Ordinarily we’d absolve both the four Democratic candidates who ran, and the Arlington County Democratic Committee itself, from direct blame in this anemic (nay, flaccid) turnout. But outside some campaign signage on medians, was there really any effort within the Democratic leadership or the campaigns themselves to engage the broader community?
What’s left of the Arlington press corps[e] also deserves some criticism for lack of interest. We include ourselves, although we did cover the campaign in advance of the voting, both through candidate kickoffs and at candidate forums.
And of course, the 150,000-plus Arlingtonians on the voting rolls, perhaps 75 percent of them Democrats, who couldn’t be bothered to cast a ballot, in person or online, in the caucus have some share of the blame.
It’s hard to expect accountability from politicians when so few show up to vote for them in the first place. Quite the sad state of affairs when (almost literally) nobody seems to care.
