Forum Editorial: Elections are better when contested

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If you’re ever interviewed by a journalist — by any journalist, anywhere about anything — you’re probably going to hear the same two bookended questions: At the beginning of the interview, you’ll be asked, “How do you spell your name?” And at the end, you’ll be asked, “Do you have anything to add?”

That last one is often the most important in any reporter’s toolkit, a catchall for any topics, any asides, or anything they may have forgotten that you might want to say. And frequently, it’s the question that leads to the most informative discussions that prove most valuable to readers.

No one is more ready for that question than candidates for public office, who use their answer to bring the conversation back to whatever is most important to them and what they most want voters to know about their platform.

With the filing deadline for April’s municipal elections left behind us in the dust of 2022, one thing is clear: most candidates won’t have to add anything at all beyond the fact they’re on the ballot.

There were few silver linings of the charged pandemic climate of the past couple of years, but one of them was a marked increase in community engagement at the local level.

Over the past few years, attendance at Maryville City Council meetings sometimes grew so large that they had to move the venue to the community center just to fit everyone in.

Unfortunately, it appears that time has passed.

Just two years ago, the stage at the Lee and Nina Schneider Center for the Performing Arts was packed full of candidates for local office. The races for City Council, Maryville R-II school board and Nodaway County Health Department, for example, each saw four candidates running for two open seats.

This year, none of those three will see contested races for the same number of open seats — and they’re far from the only ones.

And at the last health department, school board and City Council meetings, the public could have been seated in a closet: not one member of the public attended to observe or ask questions at any of those meetings. And that holds true for more than just those three entities.

It’s a shame that we can say that qualifies as “back to normal.”

However, the work our elected officials do continues to be just as important as ever, even if it no longer involves who must wear a mask when.

While we make no judgments about the quality of the uncontested candidates, we do firmly believe that in a democracy of any size, it’s better to hear two ideas rather than just one, and three rather than just two.

In an opposed race, it doesn’t take candidates to be on diametrically opposed sides of something for their ideas to be valuable. Simply highlighting different priorities, for example, can help a voter think about issues in new ways themselves.

Perhaps just as importantly, a dialogue helps candidates think about their job as an elected official critically, to be exposed to other perspectives and to think about the pros and cons of different issues in ways they hadn’t considered before.

That type of environment breeds the kind of oversight our local boards desperately need, reminding our elected officials that seldom are they in the answers business — no one expects them to write policy and come up with long-term plans for success for the agency they’re charged with overseeing.

Instead, they’re in the questions business — to serve as our eyes and ears, the ones we have entrusted with guiding the people who do come up with those plans and to ask the questions that those on the outside may not know need to be asked.

We’ve seen what happens when our elected officials are not curious, do not ask questions and don’t think about issues from other people’s perspectives.

Here in northwest Missouri, we pride ourselves on leading the way, on finding solutions where others find only obstacles and on putting aside our differences — and our prides — in service to our neighbors.

Over the next year, we encourage our readers to keep up with their elected officials (We’ll do our best to help you.), to think about the issues they grapple with and to decide by next December:

Do I have anything to add?