I find it extremely ironic that in Ann Arbor, a community that takes such pride in its diversity, tolerance and inclusiveness, requires individuals, who seek to serve the community, to affix upon themselves a partisan label as a type of pre-condition to providing that service. As we well know, many citizens seeking to provide local service have simply accepted a currently more favorable label while begrudgingly suppressing their true party allegiance.

We should abolish the locally meaningless party labels. Allow an open primary where the candidates would be evaluated on their local positions, not national affiliations and the top two vote getters would face each other in the general.

“Running dogs” is a term I haven’t heard in a few years.

As I remember, a recent check with the city clerk showed about 95,000 registered voters. Say the population of Ann Arbor is 114,000. That means that 83% are registered to vote. Subtracting the number of people who are not eligible, such as those under age, you get a even higher percentage of registered voters.

What’s a number that accurately reflects registered voters? I surly don’t know, but it’s likely to be less than 95K.

That’s not what I meant to write. Something more like, ” … or else we’ll have decided we like them non-partisan style after all.”

The upside to a ballot question is that many of points in this thread will have a chance to be put through a more demanding crucible of community conversation. Without an actual question on the ballot, the arguments are fairly academic.

And however the vote on the ballot question comes out, we will have either actively affirmed for the first time in a half century that we like our local elections the way they are, or else we’ll have decided we still like them partisan-style. Then we can move on to the next thing. Ann Arbor’s equivalent of Bruce Laidlaw 50 years from now can then include the ballot question of 2012 in the written history of Ann Arbor elections and why they are partisan/non-partisan. (I’m planning to be dead by then.)

You mean as opposed to Republicans becoming Democrats?

@10: “But the partisan identification of a candidate is often the most important piece ofinformation about that candidate. It tells the voter how the candidate is likely to stand on a wide variety of issues.”

Name ten.

With regard to non-partisan elections, it appears there’s a lot of data out there that would indicate how cities fare when they’re non-partisan. I think it’s at least worth investigating how voters turn out in other college towns relative to us, and whether deceptive people are any more likely to get elected via “stealth” campaigns in non-partisan systems. I know we’re special, but it seems that the 99% of other communities in Michigan might’ve been on to something when they made the decision not to politicize local government elections. (Is there really a Democrat or Republican way to fill a pothole?)

Plus, there is little to no candidate vetting by the Democrat or Republican “establishment” in this area. As noted in the previous column, this was the one of the original reasons for establishing a partisan system.