Inside Out: Bracing to make election choices

The political season has been underway for months but it didn’t click into high gear until the hurricane and the Labor Day holiday weekend were behind us. Now a few more weeks have slid by and suddenly it feels as if we’re up against it.

The yard signs are proliferating. Those and the ads in the paper seem to be the backbone of most campaigns, along with fundraisers and meet-and-greets and a few question-and-answer appearances before homeowner associations.

A highlight of every town election is the League of Women Voters and the Shelter Island Association co-sponsored candidate forum at the school, which will be held this year on Sunday, October 23 in the auditorium from 1 to 4 p.m. The first half of the program will feature the candidates for Town Board seats. The second half will offer two panels, candidates for supervisor and candidates for highway superintendent. Audience members will be able to submit questions on index cards.

Another highlight, to some people more than others, is the Reporter’s endorsement editorial, which usually appears in the last issue before the vote, which this year is on November 8.

The last time I was editor of the Reporter, I interviewed the candidates and wrote profiles of them. At some point, in 2006, I think, I sent questionnaires out instead of writing the profiles. It seemed more efficient for everyone. It’s hard to pore through a long profile to isolate a candidate’s stand on the issues.

That’s why we decided to do questionnaires this year. They went out last weekend and are due back Monday, October 17.

We sent them only to those candidates who face challengers this fall. Three do not, Town Tax Receiver Nancy Kotula and Town Assessors Al Hammond and BJ Ianfola. Their important work is non-political and purely administrative. I often wonder if their jobs shouldn’t be appointed rather than elected positions.

In the past, once all the profiles or questionnaire answers had been published over the course of several issues in October, I used to write endorsements in the issue before the November election. I would talk things over with the staff, which I seem to recall was a little bigger then. We always agreed on the choices so there were no debates or hard choices. Or so I remember.

After I left the paper in 2006, editor Cara Loriz used an alternative process that I think makes good sense. She and the staff voted to determine endorsements. I’m certainly willing to consider using that process but some variations may be necessary.

How we define “staff” may be an essential element of the process. There are so few of us these days. We have only two full-time newsroom staffers, me and our hard-working new reporter, Elizabeth Laytin. We do not live here, which has its advantages and disadvantages. There are two part-timers, our trusty, rock-solid community news editor Archer Brown and our new proofreader, JoAnn Kirkland, both locals. We also have Carol Galligan, another Islander, who comes in a couple of days to write profiles and some features.

I’d prefer to have more Islanders than that in the process so I’ll poll all our regular contributors, columnists and non-news employees. In the end, I think the process will be a bit fuzzier than a simple up or down vote.

No matter what, the bottom line will be that I, as editor, will have to take responsibility for whatever our choices turn out to be, even if it is based on a consensus that I might disagree with.

By the way, I do not think of our endorsements as Words of Wisdom From On High. We don’t offer them to influence the vote or flex our muscle (if we have any muscle when it comes to elections, which I really doubt). Nor are we trying to pick the likely winner.

No, the point is to pick the people we think will do the best job — based on their personalities and styles, their knowledge of and experience with local public issues, and their judgment and their record of decision-making. Party affiliations have nothing to do with it.

Singling out a few to endorse when all of the candidates have their pluses and minuses can be tough. It can be especially hard when you like and respect them all — as I do the full field of contenders this year. All are good people with particular strengths. But the seats must be filled. Voters have to choose. So do we.

A newspaper that doesn’t make endorsements, or declares one race or another a “toss up,” or withholds its support because it, thinks none of the candidates deserve it, is copping out on a basic duty: to offer an informed opinion that voters can use as a reference point, one that they can accept or reject.

An endorsement also may reveal a newspaper’s editorial thinking on the issues. While a paper’s news stories must be unbiased, an editorial is supposed to be a matter of opinion. Newspapers should suppress their opinions in the news columns. But the paper that cloaks them in the op-ed section isn’t being straight with its readers.

•

I’m still in the process of recording, editing and posting videos of the candidates on the Reporter website. Weather, scheduling and other tasks at hand have been complicating the process.

But videos on all the candidates for supervisor and Town Board are now posted. To see them, go to sireporter.com, scroll down until you see the tabs for “latest videos” and “latest slideshows,” and click on the videos tab. They are all there in chronological order, with the most recent to the left and the earliest off screen to the right.