Judge allows more partisanship in elections
School board races and others set to get uglier
A federal judge recently handed down a ruling that could drastically change local elections in Florida — by allowing candidates in nonpartisan races to wage wildly partisan campaigns.
Until now, Florida had a law that said candidates for nonpartisan seats, such as county commission and school board, weren’t allowed to run ads telling voters they were a Republican or Democrat.
The goal was for candidates to talk about issues instead of party warfare. And it’s one reason local races in Florida have traditionally been less nasty and strident than legislative or congressional ones.
But a school board candidate in Escambia County who’d been fined $200 for telling voters he was a “lifelong Republican” sued the state, claiming the law violated his right to free speech.
The federal judge agreed, saying the state law was an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment.
I think the court got it right. Government has no business telling you what you can or can’t say — whether you’re running for office or staging a protest.
That said, as much as I agree with the ruling, I think it’s going to do ugly things to an already degraded political process.
The last thing Americans need is more partisanship.
I’d like my county commissioners focused on roads, parks and garbage pickup, not screaming about Joe Biden or Donald Trump.
In fact, if I had my druthers, candidates’ party affiliation wouldn’t even be listed on ballots. That’s probably an unpopular idea. But I like the idea of asking voters to study the candidates, their positions and their backgrounds instead of just looking for the R or D next to their names.
Think about it. If I asked you to choose between two candidates and told you only that your choices were Sarah Smith or John Jones, you’d probably do research to see whether Sarah or John was
the better candidate.
But if I asked you to choose between Sarah, a Republican, and John, the Democrat, many people wouldn’t both to learn anything else about either one — even if, as it turned out, Sarah had run three businesses into the ground or John’s platform included banning puppy dogs.
Partisan-based voting is often just lazy.
The legitimate argument for including party labels is that it gives voters more information about where candidates theoretically stand on issues. But even that can be misleading, since candidates sometimes switch parties if they think it gives them a better chance of winning.
Admittedly, much of what I long for — and what this unconstitutional Florida law sought to encourage by banning partisan talk — is more idealistic than realistic.
In fact, Orange County’s elections-office attorney Nick Shannin observed that the 31-page court ruling probably just signaled a formal ending to a quixotic goal that hadn’t really been achieved anyway.
“Essentially we had agreed collectively to a social contract where races would be waged with nary a whisper of partisanship, but those days are toast,” Shannin said. “And this ruling is the logical extension of that.”
You’ve seen it more in recent years — candidates running for school board who talk more about culture wars than math scores. That was already intensifying even if candidates hadn’t been allowed to advertise their party affiliation.
One of the biggest problems with partisanship is that it sometimes prompts people to support or defend politicians and actions they never otherwise would, simply because they view the politicians as teammates.
It’s why some Democrats fume about executive orders when Republican politicians issue them but not when their own party leaders do so. And why many Republicans are silent when the GOP bloats the national debt and then act outraged when Democrats do the same.
A good example here in Florida involves GOP lawmakers’ push to ban private companies from saying things in their employee-training sessions that the lawmakers dislike, particularly as it relates to diversity and inclusion.
If you walked up to the average conservative on the street — someone
who claimed to believe in free speech, free markets and the U.S. Constitution — and told them you wanted to outlaw conversations you dislike within the walls of privately run companies, most conservatives would tell you to pound sand and maybe suggest you move to Russia.
But if you tell them that their Republican teammates want to ban certain conversations in the name of combating “wokeism,” suddenly they’re in favor of government-restricted speech.
It’s nonsense. And unconstitutional.
(And why that part of the so-called “Stop WOKE Act” will probably be struck down — for the same reason the federal judge invalidated the ban on speech in campaigns, because government can’t tell private citizens what they’re allowed to say or discuss.)
The bottom line is that you can expect the next round of local elections in Florida to be more partisan than ever before.
You’ll likely hear county commission candidates in places like dark-blue Orange County talk more about their Democratic affiliation
than their plan for improving traffic congestion and school board candidates in deep-red Lake talk more about their GOP values than how they hope to improve graduation rates.
They’ll now have a right to do so, as they probably always should have.
Government can’t force voters to cast ballots based on the issues instead of partisanship. Only voters have that power. Then again, they always have.