"Meet the new boss; same as the old boss..."

For the first time in my adult life, I'm guilty of not voting in an election.

I'm not proud of it, by any means. It was a sequence of things that caused it. A recent move, my even more recent birthday (putting off the annual trip to the Secretary of State), a general lack of organization and missing the deadline to be eligible to vote in the Plymouth-Canton School Board election. Once I missed that, I wondered: should I really vote in a city where I'm still registered but no longer live? I was uncertain of the right answer to that even at 6 p.m. on election night, but I ultimately decided I shouldn't.

So perhaps it is more truthful to say it was a series of flimsy excuses that caused me to miss my first vote in decades. I will probably continue to probe that reasoning for days to come, much the way I would a missing molar.

Both races featured one of my campaign pet peeves, too. In Wayne, bullies were concentrating more on personalities than issues, and in the Plymouth-Canton race, a defined voting block of four candidates shared the same sign and platform and, apparently, backing from a well-funded political group.

In Wayne, the bullies won the day and the one candidate that was actually talking about issues and solutions was defeated because of some controversy in his past; while the greater threat to free speech and transparency of the local government won a seat on the council.
In Plymouth-Canton, the four-person slate was at least partially successful; two of the four earned spots on the school board, and all of the incumbents seeking re-election were defeated.

I'm always fascinated by campaign strategy and usually disappointed that the tried-and-true methods of making voters afraid of someone or something and then throwing money at the problem are usually successful. This time around, social media--the local equivalent of the 60-second news cycle--played its role, too. That was interesting, watching discussion boards on facebook and reading about someone's foibles as they were presented by his opponents--who, as usual, rarely really identified themselves.

Misinformation, or at least the allegations of it, played a role, too. I think this is as much of a symptom of the dwindling budgets of local newspapers with reporters and editors that truly know their communities as anything else. The expansion and availability of the internet is a suspect, too. Information is free-flowing, but context is not. Forgiveness seems a thing of the past, too.

Ironically, I don't think the access to all this new information makes us any more informed as voters. The 60-second news cycle has, in some way, eroded our ability to effectively weigh (or in some cases to even substantiate) actual information. In that way maybe we are all 'karaoke voters,' casting a vote after whatever name we recognize, or against whatever issue we are concerned about, no matter where the actual facts are.

Until we can figure out a way to overcome that, I'm afraid that we will be stuck in a cycle ruled by blame and fear, while true progress eludes us.