Washington State Has Awful Timing

In case you haven’t noticed - in August, who’d want to? - there’s a political campaign under way. Candidates for city council, school board and mayor are struggling to get their names before the voters of Washington state. But in the closing days of summer, politics are easy to overlook.

This is not healthy for the essential ingredient in representative democracy: knowledgeable voters.

In Washington state, candidates file at the end of July. During the month of August, however, many voters are out of town. August is a time for barbecues, gardening, family vacations and lazy evenings on the dock. Then Labor Day passes and suddenly, amid a forest of campaign signs, voters have two weeks to choose among a flurry of often-unfamiliar names that appear on primary election ballots in mid-September.

This is lousy timing.

It simply takes time, as well as public attention, to sort through a primary election field. It is an unfortunate fact of most election years that some candidates have bankruptcies, criminal convictions, inflated resumes and unstable employment histories hiding in their backgrounds. The shorter the campaign, the less likely it is that such discoveries can be made.

Most candidates, of course, have attractive qualifications and these, too, deserve to be fully understood before voters make their choices.

Some reformers, particularly those who concern themselves merely with the chores of ballot counting, are talking about moving Washington state’s primary election just a little bit - into August. That would provide more time for officials to count the growing number of absentee ballots, determine who won the primary election and distribute absentee ballots for the November election.

However, to conduct the entire campaign as well as the election in the dog days of summer would be worse, from the standpoint of informed public participation.

Half of the states have the good judgment to hold their primary elections in the spring, when the entire campaign period, from filing week to voting day, has a better crack at the electorate’s full attention. Once primary election choices are made, campaigning dies down until fall, when voters are ready to shoulder their civic duties again.

That is the schedule Washington ought to adopt.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board