Winning by 211 votes Dave Bentz beats off his challenger….

But the big news, is that 1505 people  of that district actually made an effort to go to the polls on a freaking Saturday and vote for who would be their first line of defense in our State Legislature.  72 even went to more trouble and voted absentee. Since there are very close to 15,000 registered voters living within the confines of the 18th, turnout was at 10%…..  on a Saturday…. in September…. when no one else was running on any ticket anywhere….

In the last off election year(2014), the top ticket got 4280 votes (Coons-Wade-Groff); In the last presidential year (2012), 9293 votes in the 18th were cast for the top ticket….

A better comparison would be to the last local special election… which would be for president of County Council in 2011 between Sheldon/Kovach/ and two splitters.  In that election, the 18th mustered a more average number of 740 votes. For this election twice as many people came out, and as should be expected in local elections, the local neighborhoods of each candidate were the ones with the largest numbers voting.

I think it is safe to say that the real number of actual voters is closer to 9293 than to the 15,000 allegedly on the books… and we politicos should start using this number to report turnout among ourselves and hope others catch on and follow this good trend. If we accept this from just a practical standpoint then the turnout in this election in real terms was higher at 16.9%…. For a special election that is rather high.

Some people still decry the low voter turnout.. I know I used to…  I thought it said bad things about America.

But after studying the effects of school board elections which have even lower turnouts, I have come to the conclusion that the reason most people don’t vote in special elections is because they do not know anything about them.  if they vote they are voting for a sign, or worse, a party. In local elections, party is less an issue.  They are more afraid of voting in someone bad by just walking in, eeney, meeney, miney mo-ing, and would rather leave that decision to someone else..

Therefore Democracy is best served where only those who are knowledgeable about their government, are the only ones who vote…  In this case the 17 percenters…

Because even if you got more people to the polls on a freakin’ Saturday in September,  if they don’t know who to vote for, what good are they?  Most of our bad elected officials get elected by people who have no idea what they are doing…. and the last thing we need, the very last thing we need, are more people like Evans on the Christina School Board… who have no clue what they are doing…

And with special elections, getting people to know you beforehand, is very difficult.  You can walk through neighborhoods, hand out pamphlets, but that says nothing…  A dogcatcher walks through neighborhoods and hands out pamphlets too… “Spay your pet”…

Of course… it would be better if everyone were as knowledgeable about politics as us… Our circle would widen and we’d have a wider audience to talk to. But alas, if everyone was on top of politics as us… who then would play baseball?

So bottom line out of all this is….

Dave Bentz Beats Off Challenger….