Alachua Voter Guide

It appears that I will need a co-administrator to take over the mundane tasks at Alachua Voter Guide so that I can run for Mayor of Gainesville. Yes, I did say that I would not run back in October, but I have felt more and more compelled to do so. I plan on using this site as much as I have encouraged EVERY candidate to use this site. No opponent will be shut out of AVG. I have never denied any candidate his or her space here, and have never censored them. (I have occasionally fixed an email link for someone who did not know how to make one.)

If you have a problem with my imitation of Bret Favre, my dithering between running and not running, just remember that it’s the worst thing you can say about him this year. And if that’s the worst thing you can say about me, then I can live with that.

Web site coming soon!

Don Marsh

From time to time people ask me if I plan on running for local office again. I have been encouraged to do so, and I hear that my name does come up once in awhile. This is both flattering and a little bit gratifying. I had a lot of fun running for the County Commission back in 2002, and I learned a lot by doing it. It’s nice to know that I have some residual fan base out there. It makes up for the people who have canceled appointments with me because of things I have blogged about.

Next year, on March 16 to be exact, Gainesville is having an election for Mayor, and I have to admit that I was tempted. I am deeply dissatisfied with our city government. The candidates who have signed up thus far leave me nonplussed on a good day. I feel like I am suffering from taxation without representation, and I want to do something about it. However, there is one thing that I learned from 2002 that is even more applicable than it was then: running for public office is costly, and I am not talking about campaign costs. I am self-employed, and in 2002, even though I still worked full time while campaigning for 10 months, I completely lost focus on my business and I had a huge shortfall that year. Last year, when the bottom fell out of the housing market and the stock market was in the tank, was the first time ever, in 28 years, that my business actually lost money. I am still digging myself out of that hole, so this is a bad time for me to be a candidate.

Back in 2004, in order to stay involved in local politics and supply some service to the people who run in local races, I started a website that would make it convenient for voters to find the candidates all in one place. I also contacted candidates and told them I would give them all the space they wanted on that site for free. I took pictures, went to forums, and reported on what happened on that site. It was time consuming, but cheap to do. And it didn’t hurt my business, because doing this was nothing like being a candidate.

Over the past several years there have been two big disappointments. One is that candidates don’t really use Alachua Voter Guide in any meaningful way. They just think this is my blog, and they hope I will write favorably about them. The fact is, I DON’T WANT TO WRITE ABOUT THEM AT ALL! I have offered them all a username and password and begged them to blog here themselves. I only write what I do because they don’t write at all. The second disappointment is that voters just don’t care about local candidates and what their local officials are up to. On election day, local races are an afterthought. People come out in pretty good numbers to vote for or against someone they either love or hate at the top of the ballot, and most everything else is voting in the dark. Our city commission races, which seldom have the big races as a drawing card, usually get only a 12-15% voter turnout. It’s only different when the vote coincides with a presidential preference primary. Then it zooms up to 30%. This past primary was different because of the hyped Obama candidacy.  That gave us a staggering 46% turnout. All of which is still pathetic.

Although I will not be a candidate in the near future, I will still be pouring my free time into Alachua Voter Guide. But frustration with our local government AND voter apathy has made me realize I have to amp up  my own writing. I believe that I must care a lot more than the candidates do about outreach, because they seem to be content with fighting over the same pool of voters who make up that 12% of the electorate who care enough to pay attention. More people must pay attention.

I believe that we have a democratic process for two reasons. One is to choose people who will represent our interest. The other is to get rid of them when they fail to do so. If there is no accountability, we may as well appoint them as commissars for life and just be good little drones and do whatever they tell us. I am afraid that too many of us already have that role down cold.

Stay tuned. It’s nest-whacking time…

If 2008 is any indicator, we will definitely be getting less news from the local printed authority, the Gainesville Sun. These are trying times for newspapers across America. The Sun’s own Mothership, the New York Times, is in financial trouble. The Sun also had to combine with the the Ocala Star Banner to stay alive, and it is now in a smaller format, AND it costs more than ever.

This past election cycle the Sun did such an appalling job of covering the local elections that I asked one of their reporters what was going on. I was told they just did not have the manpower anymore. In spite of what some conservatives may think, the Sun’s in-house cartoonist, Jake Fuller, was not let go for ideological reasons. He was just another employee they could not afford to retain.

Newspapers everywhere have been losing ad revenue to the Internet. That does not mean people are spending their ad money on Internet advertising. It means that many people who used to use the classifieds are now taking advantage of free ads on craigslist. Craigslist is all over the country, and the Gainesville chapter is thriving. Since some businesses are also diverting a part of their advertising budgets to the Internet in the form of their own websites and search engine optimization and Google Adwords, and other venues, newspapers are missing more than a few sales.

You may not think that this impacts you because you can get so much information online for free. But, someone is being paid to cover national and international stories because they have a bigger audience, which means it’s easier to sell ads for that market. Our problem is that no one really covers our local politicians adequately. An even bigger problem is that local politicians are an afterthought at best, so there is very little financial reward for advertisers and, by extension, reporters, who would cover local meetings and their associated shenanigans.

The past few years I have offered ALL politicans, no matter what their ideological stripes, free reign to get their messages out at no cost. Cue the crickets. They also seem to have little interest in telling you any more than what makes a flattering bullet list on a shiny brochure. Therefore, I am giving up on their lot. No, that doesn’t mean I will be withholding space from them and denying them the right to get out the word on this site. It just means I am through begging them, and wasting my time chasing them around and asking them to tell YOU what they are up to.

I believe that our last best hope is that a small band of us will start taking up the task of informing our friends and neighbors about local candidates and local issues. In short, I need YOU. We need you. Our local government needs you to stick your nose in its business and write about it here. You don’t need to cover everything; just adopt a cause, an advisory board meeting, a politican, an issue, and write about it here. All I ask is that you try to be fair, try to get both sides of any concerns, and PUT YOUR NAME ON IT.

I love the Internet, but I am weary of the anonymity that allows people to say anything without any accoutability at all. I have no problem with the comments section of each article being that way, but if you are going to report, you should be willing to put your name on it. If we are going to do a good job and replace the Gainesville Sun, we are going to have to set a high water mark for credibility.

Did I say replace the Gainesville Sun? Yes. Fortunately, this is not too tall an order. Not only have they been inadequate; there is no prognosis for them to get better. We cannot wait for things to magically improve. And we cannot continue to let our local politicans and candidates get away with their minimalist leadership.

What will you get out of this? Some measure of gratitude from your many readers, and the satisfaction that comes with doing a public service. I have made nothing at this since 2004 when I started. Yes, I have an innocuous ad for my business, but it’s the least I should get for the trouble. And I cannot say that I have gotten even a single job out of it. Instead, I get a great lift when someone from overseas sends me an email saying that he or she can now make an informed vote on an absentee ballot because of this site. I know that what I am doing matters. I just wish I could do more. But, I am like most of you: a busy person with work, a family, and other obligations. But I will give a small slice of my life, and income, to help make local voters better aware of the issues here in Alachua County. Do you not have a small slice of your life to give to improve our community?

It’s a New Year, and you can engage in a new mission that really matters. Just send me an email and include this information:

Your REAL name
A phone number when I can reach you and verify your existence
A brief resume of what you have to offer, or what you plan to cover

Email this information to me at dontwc@gmail.com. I will get back to you with a username and password and some brief guidelines. They will not be onerous.

So, what will 2009 bring? I am gunning for more accountable leaders, more informed voters, and better solutions for our community’s challenges. Is it too much to hope for?

Thanks to a free Wordpress Plugin called Mippen, you can now get this site in an agreeable format on your iPhone, Blackberry, Palm Device, or other Smartphones and other mobile devices. It’s all a part of my ongoing effort to reach as many people as possible in a manner that is convenient for them.

Don Marsh

It is no secret that I have been disappointed in the lack of participation on this site by local candidates. For all the traffic we get, there is still little effort expended to interact with the voting public. The people of this county need to be better informed than they are, in my opinion. Local candidates and local issues are an afterthought to most people, who are mesmerized by national and international news and blind to the troubles at home.

Obviously, I am not pleased with the way our local government exploits our ignorance, so incumbents will probably consider this site to be “unfair” or “biased”. Well, it doesn’t have to be. They can still get a username and password and blog their brains out here. And I wish they would! The public needs you to be accessible to their concerns. They can also comment on anything I have to say. The comments here are moderated, but it’s only to keep out spammers who want to share their Viagra ads and stripper-cams. My critics have always been allowed free reign to say whatever they want.

This new policy means a lot more work for me, and I still get paid nothing for it, so it’s not like I am going to be able to quit my business and hound public officials full time. And I will not be using this site as a platform to surreptitiously run for office of some kind. I have been queried about this by several people, and I have entertained the notion, but I have decided against it. There needs to be a much broader answer to our current apathy crisis than getting one man elected. There needs to be a general uprising among the mainstream voters to demand accountability and replacement of current officials. People should be standing in line to take their jobs, but so far there is just the disappointing trickle of interest.

Thanks for staying tuned. I will keep you abrest of things as I am able. Anyone who wants to help is welcome.

Don Marsh

After a week, I am glad to report that Humpty Dumpty has been put back together again. Alachua Voter Guide is operational and ready to tweak its mission. But before I talk about that, I want to thank the folks at my web hosting company, Hostica.com. I have been an infernal nuisance to them over the years due to the fact that I am an ambitious web designer with few web design skills. I fire off a trouble ticket whenever things are less than optimal, and this time I was having a hard time recovering and reinstalling the articles that have accumulated over the past year or so. Well, they really stepped up and recovered files that I thought had been deleted when I changed servers. Kudos to Chris and Frank at Hostica. They were life savers!

You may have noticed that I got rid of that annoying “any subscribe” widget that used to create a pop-up menu whenever your cursor got near it. If it was driving me crazy, I know it had to bother others. It is now history. If you are a big enough propeller-head to know about subscribing via all those news readers, you don’t need a special pop-up menu to do it.

I also will start using this cool post avatar that allows authors to include a photo in every post by simply choosing to do so in the write-post window.

In my next post, I will talk about some editorial changes that will be made here.

Don Marsh

I have been waiting for the Election to be over before I do this. I really need to move this site to Linux servers. It will be a terrible ordeal for me. I have never done it before. That means it will not be very nice for you, either. On the upside…there isn’t much news right now either.

Here goes…

Consider this a bit of Election Postmortem, if you will. This past Tuesday night yielded a number of predictable results, which I had largely predicted correctly. Incumbents rolled to victory, except in one case. The turnout was pathetic. All of it, in hindsight, is easily explained. And a new challenger should be able to learn something from this.

It helps to understand how people think when they go to the voting booth. If it’s November, they are there because the top of the ticket has energized them. For the vast majority of the voters, the local candidates are an afterthought. That explains why a locals-only election gets only a 24.6% turnout. In those moments, the voter goes through a couple of defaults to make a decision.

1. Are they informed enough to have a compelling reason to vote for a candidate? The compelling reason trumps party affiliation. But very few voters have a compelling reason to vote for a local candidate, because they are usually fairly uninformed. Therefore, the majority of voters go to default number…
2. Party Affiliation. When that candidate has a D or and R after his or her name, it matches a list of reasons the voter already has in mind.
3. Name Recognition. Known beats unknown all the time. In the School Board race for the 4th district seat, a non-partisan race, Janie Williams, the incumbent, lost to Barbara Sharpe because voters have been seeing her campaign signs for years. Ms. Williams was a first term member of the board. Ms. Sharpe appeared to be the incumbent to people who didn’t know any better.

This year’s November election is going to pose a particularly thorny problem to those who oppose Democrats. Because of the extremely high level of interest in Barack Obama in Alachua County, there is going to be a huge Democrat turnout here. There is also, due to the fact that Senator Obama is the first black major party candidate on the ballot ever, going to be an unprecedented black turnout. And this large Obama-sized turnout is going to vote for other Democrats on the ballot. Their major default will be party identification, and candidates with a D after their names will be the beneficieries.

The conventional wisdom is usually to make sure you get “your people” out in higher numbers than those of your opponent. But you are not going to do that this time around if you aren’t a Democrat. You are going to have to give people a compelling reason to vote for you, and you are going to have to make sure people get it.

Lonnie Scott gave the voters a compelling reason for not re-electing the Sheriff. What made it most compelling was that Sheriff did not try to dispel those reasons. She showed her resentment, but did not  really make a case for herself. However, the Gainesville Sun, the local newspaper of record, completely ignored it and never reported it. TV20 did, but the newspaper withheld the aura of legitimacy that Scott needed. They did print opposing editorials by the former head of the jail, and by the Sheriff herself, but those are just opinion pieces. And it wasn’t until after the election that they printed a letter from former two term sheriff Steve Oelrich that lambasted Sheriff Darnell making a pretense fo cleaning up corruption. To be fair to the Sun, it may be that Oelrich didn’t write until that last minute. And if Oelrich had really been so outraged by the campaign Darnell was running, he has had months to make a lot of very public endorsements and to star in a few TV commercials. But he didn’t.

Lonnie Scott’s compelling reason was the proverbial tree that fell in the woods when no one was there. For most, it just didn’t happen. People did not get the message, and they yawned through the election by largely not showing up; the powers of incumbency and name recognition doing the rest.

As a challenger, you will have to use everything at your disposal to get your message out. You will not be able to count on the Sun to do that for you. And the forums are small attendance events that are sparsely reported at best. And those forums, when they are rebroadcast, are not ratings-winners either. You will have to go to these events, but you will also have to go around them to the thousands who will mindlessly vote for no real reason in November.

And it starts by daring to go directly to the public over the Internet.  Use this site. Blog about your compelling reasons. Interact intelligently with the commenters. You will not reach most voters this way, but you will have a deeper impact on a core number of people. Those people will help you reach the others. They will be more inclined to give to your campaign. They will be more inclined to talk to their friends. They will be more inclined to volunteer. They will be more on board your campaign than some members of your family who are just being indulgent.

Remember, if you are not a Democrat in November, your odds are already extremely bad. You have nothing to lose. DO NOT listen to that consultant who tells you to play it safe, look harmless, and buy all the yard signs you can get.

As far as the public is concerned, they are looking for a reason to vote for you. If they don’t find one, they will go to the defaults, or not vote in your race at all. In 2004, 10,000 voters opted NOT to vote in the county commission races AFTER they had voted for a presidential candidate. They simply had no reason to vote at all.

Hello. I will be on vacation next week and will not be able to go to the candidate forum at the Best Western Gateway Grand. It starts at 4pm on Thursday, July 24. The Gateway Grand is on the service road behind the Dairy Queen at I-75 and 39th Ave. I will be in South Carolina, recharging my soul, so I cannot make it. But some of YOU can!

The video below is simply one of me imploring someone, maybe a lot of someones, to get a close seat, take 1-3 minute video clips, depending on the length of the answers, and either send them to me at dontwc@gmail.com, or upload them to YouTube yourself, and then send me the link.

It would be a great public service to catch these rascals when they actually have to tell an audience what they are about, instead of depending on the glossy postcards about nothing.

I plan on using more of these to promote Alachua Voter Guide. I have used YouTUbe to show candidate forums in High Springs before. I hope some candidates or their helpers will do the same…