As we come upon Super Tuesday and other primary dates, I thought it was important to mention that voting in primaries matters as much as voting in the general elections. Like with the general elections, there are local races that are probably not getting much press that you should absolutely pay attention to.
Let’s start at the top. If you use Ballotpedia to create a sample ballot based on your voting address, you should see the federal elections (in my case, Presidential and Congressional district candidates) and state races (Senate and House of Representatives). I’m (not surprisingly) voting in the Democratic Party primary, so without Ballotpedia, I wouldn’t have realized that our incumbent state representative has no primary candidates from other parties. When we bought this house in 2016, I noticed in that general election that several positions only had Republican candidates, so this is definitely a shift. If there’s one thing you can give the previous President credit for, it was galvanizing people to run for office at all levels because of how offensive he was (well, is).
And that’s where Ballotpedia stops for me. It says there are 4 candidate races on my ballot, so I have to research the county and township races somewhere else. Most of the primary candidates at this level are both incumbents and running unopposed, leaving only one race I feel I should research: the county recorder. Since the local races are the ones that will have a more direct impact on me – they influence property taxes, school and library boards, and such (though I still don’t know why county coroner is an elected position) – I’ll take the time to look up these two candidates before completing my mail-in ballot.