There are elections tomorrow in Washington state for members of regional conservation district boards. Only a few hundred votes get cast, apparently, and this isn’t surprising because it’s tough to find any information about the elections except the times and locations of the voting (at a few library branches).
It’s almost impossible to find a list of candidates and their position statements, so you’re left to depend on guidance from the more obscure political blogs. The left wing blogs just say “vote for the guy the Sierra Club endorses.”
As it happens, a friend of mine burrowed around and located the five candidate’s statements. Fortunate there were two or three candidates who were politically acceptable to him because the Sierra Club’s endorsed guy was completely unimpressive in print. I read the fellow’s statement and came away undecided — undecided, that is, about whether I was more appalled by his typos, poor spelling, sentence fragments, bureaucratic jargon, or just his general incoherence.
“I am running for the board position of King Conservation District, because I am a conservationist that leads by example represents the Mission and Vision of the Conservation District.”
“During my teenier as Chair I increased our partnerships with Landowners within King County either privately or entity owned.”
“In CLOSING; I request your vote so that the word CONSERVATION and partnership remains the main focus of King Conservation District.”
Has the Sierra Club actually read anything this person writes?
It’s all the sadder because one of the other candidates has a great background in natural resources and works with many of the newer and more successful sustainability efforts in the area — the ones that are effectively communicating the value of their work to the general public.
One of those groups, Urban Foodlink, has a good blog post about the election. You might want to take a look, and then swing by a polling place tomorrow and vote.