I thought I’d share some bright news in and amongst the North Korean missiles, hurricanes, and racist-pardonings.
Fairfax County is one of the wealthier counties in Virginia. It has a 12-member school board, and those slots are fiercely competed as the board serves as a springboard for higher office elsewhere… which is true of any school board, but since Fairfax county is so populous (at 1.2M it’s larger than several states) and since our school policies tend to drive the policies in the rest of the state, maybe the springboard here has a little more “bounce”.
The school board was already mostly Democrat, with only three Republican members. One of those GOP members had to step down because her husband is taking job overseas. Her departure was reasonably timed, since there is an election in Virginia this November for Governor and the state legislature.
But no… even though she could have timed it that way, she chose to step down early and force a special election for late August. This was a cynical move - special elections in off-off years are tiny affairs, and they favor Republicans whose older voters are more likely to come out on some random Tuesday. In their emails to supporters, the GOP called this “The Scalia School Board Seat”; meaning that it was a Republican seat and they were going to do whatever they could to keep it.
In Virginia, school board elections are “non-partisan”, which in this case simply means that the ballot doesn’t have a D or an R after anyone’s name… the parties still endorse a candidate, campaign for him or her, etc. But it means that the “sample ballots” that the two parties hand out to people on their way in are more important: you might think “Oh, I’ll be voting for the Democrat”, but then when you get into the booth you might forget which one of the long list of candidates that actually is.
Whew. Lots of dull background info.
Anyway, the punchline is that our local Democrat committees pulled out all the stops for this one, and trucked in volunteers from elsewhere in the state to man entrance booths. I myself got up at some ungodly hour of the morning to set up the booth for my local polling site and then sat out there in the rain for six hours handing out the sample ballots.
Although the Democrat candidate was forecast to win by reasonable margin, she actually got roughly twice as many votes as the GOP nominee and the other two candidates only garnered 3% between them. She carried every polling district except one, and she only lost that one by 1%. The forecast was that somewhere around 7% of the public would vote, and that was reduced to 4% when the weather turned to all rain all day… but the actual turn-out was close to 10%
