Advertisement

Carlton: Could anything be more partisan than going nonpartisan?

 
Les Miller was one of two Hillsborough County commissioners to vote against giving voters a chance to make constitutional offices non-partisan. His suggestion that the commission make itself nonpartisan too was met with stony stares and died for lack of a second. [JAMES BORCHUCK   |   Times]
Les Miller was one of two Hillsborough County commissioners to vote against giving voters a chance to make constitutional offices non-partisan. His suggestion that the commission make itself nonpartisan too was met with stony stares and died for lack of a second. [JAMES BORCHUCK | Times]
Published June 21, 2018

So Hillsborough County commissioners — most of them, anyway — want voters to consider dropping political parties from certain elections, making those races nonpartisan instead.

This would mean when you go to vote in those elections, you won't know if a candidate is a Republican, Democrat or anything else unless you put some effort into finding out beforehand.

Now maybe you're thinking: In our current amped-up, us-against-them, hyper-politicized world where an elected official crossing the aisle to support The Evil Other Party is high treason, this isn't the worst idea ever.

Or maybe this wide-eyed call for us to throw off those labels, hold hands and sing Kumbaya is actually some particularly partisan political manipulation in disguise.

Five of the seven Hillsborough commissioners voted this week to put a referendum on the November ballot asking voters to decide whether to make the sheriff, court clerk, tax collector, property appraiser and elections supervisor races nonpartisan.

And it's true those jobs tend to be way less political than, say, being a county commissioner.

With this, people registered as no party affiliation or people in minor parties could vote in primaries, which are currently open only to voters in the major parties.

Here is where we note for the record that all five commissioners who voted for this are Republicans, and the two opposed are Democrats. There are reasons for this very partisan split.

Several citizens came to a public hearing this week to object to the referendum, saying the change could confuse voters who don't have time to closely follow every race and who rely on party affiliations to pick candidates that generally share their views. They said it could actually suppress the vote because people who don't have that "Rep" or "Dem" as a sorting tool might not vote at all.

And now for the more sinister theory: that Republicans are afraid of that threatened blue wave of Democrats getting elected, and ditching those designations under the cover of nonpartisanship sure sounds like a plan.

Interestingly, Democrat Commissioner Les Miller's good-for-the-goose suggestion that the commission also make itself nonpartisan was met with stony stares and died for lack of a second.

But okay, let's consider party-free races. School board members run in nonpartisan races, though in Hillsborough that's probably not a shining example. Judges run nonpartisan, but that's because they're supposed to appear impartial. Tampa City Council and the mayor also run without party affiliation, but believe me, anyone who votes in the city can tell you their candidate's party. In fact, in this Democrat-leaning town, two current mayoral candidates have already jumped from their parties to become Democrats even though the race is nonpartisan. So no, it doesn't necessarily cancel out politics. Would that it could.

The one case in which I could absolutely, unequivocally support going nonpartisan: supervisor of elections. Because shouldn't the person running the whole voting thing at least appear not to be beholden?

I'd like to think this referendum is a genuine attempt to take the politics out of politics. But in the world at the moment, it's way easier to believe that politics are the whole point.