Alachua Voter Guide

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…

Although your intrepid webmaster has been absent due to other projects, this site continues to get a steady flow of visitors. In the month of May, so far, we are averaging 150 visitors per day. That is not bad for a relatively esoteric subject such as local candidates for office. In a county where most people can name all eight of Santa’s Reindeer and all seven of Snow White’s Dwarves, few people can name 3 of their 5 county commissioners. Go ahead. Ask around. I’ve done it.

As I have been updating the site, I have been trying to track down the web sites that local candidates have made for this coming election. When Googling their names, I never get their websites, if they have them. I get THIS site on the first page of results, however, almost every time. So, if you are going to bother making a campaign website, it had better get listed here, or precious few people will find it.

I am also granting all candidates blogging privileges. That means that I give each one a username and password, and that they (or more likely a member of their campaign) can communicate directly with the people who come to this site. And they should start early. After all, 150 visitors a day adds up. And this is a slow month. February and April were both over 160, and people are not even really looking yet. In the closing days of the campaigns, we get 300-700 per day.

And best of all, this is free, and equally so. This site accomplishes, on the local level, what Campaign Finance Reform does not. It’s a level playing field. But you’ve got to  come to play…

Later,

Don Marsh

I have initiated a new spam catcher to see how it works. You may comment on the articles, but your first comment will be held for moderation. Once I know you are not a spammer I will approve you for future unmoderated comments.

Now that the January 29 election is over, I have deleted the user accounts of the candidates, except for Bonnie Mott and Lauren Poe. They still have about 3 weeks to go before their runoff. I have also changed the polls on the poll page. One is for District 2 voters to weigh in with their preference in the runoff. The other is to give a response to the Transgender Ordinance.

I am also turning off comments. People don’t use it, and all I get is drug and porn spam posted there every day. If you want to give me feedback on any of the articles, send me an email at dmarsh@donaldmarsh.com.

From now on, there will be a link to the poll at the top of the site. It’s just a free javascript poll that I have used for years on local elections sites. They are seldom a reflection of reality, but they are a good way to encourage your fellow citizens to participate in local elections.

Now keep it clean,
Don Marsh, your intrepid webmaster