There's a lot of talk about reorganization and more rounds of budget cutting in Indiana, here's one widely read blogger's thoughts on municipal elections from Capital Watchdog in response to our own Senator's proposal now in hearings.
Here’s what I think would be the perfect compromise…
- Keep local elections in the odd-numbered year, but shorten them. Instead of going from May to November, go from May to June or July. Who needs six months to run for a Council seat?
- Consolidate the primaries and let the top two vote-getters face a run off. I’m even willing to declare a winner in the primary if someone gets more than 65 percent of the vote. Let’s be honest, there really isn’t a “Democratic” or “Republican” way to run a city, either you know how to do it or you don’t.
- Get rid of voting precincts and switch to vote centers. You can do them by council district or township. Have the voting center running for two weeks prior to election day. Anyone who can’t find a couple minutes out of two weeks to go vote probably shouldn’t be voting to begin with. Also it should be a lot easier to manage a dozen voting centers for a couple weeks as opposed to 500 precincts for 12 hours.
- Add school board elections to the off-year elections. School boards, although I have no use for them, are still local government.
- And I would also eliminate straight-ticket voting, for obvious reasons.
I'll hold off my responses until we get some further commenting.
