The US presidential election gets the headlines, but Americans will also vote in thousands of down ballot races for everything from judges to tax collectors

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The US presidential election gets the headlines, but Americans will also vote in thousands of down ballot races for everything from judges to tax collectors

时间：2024-11-01 06:00 来源：未知作者：admin 阅读：次

By Casey Briggs

Topic:US Elections

Bill Roth is running for a board position on the Santa Clara Valley Water District in San Jose, California.

Tens of millions of Americans will walk into a polling place on Tuesday to cast a vote for their preferred candidate for president — Harris or Trump.

Then, they'll also be asked to vote for members of congress. Perhaps their governor. Or their local prosecutor, their water district, their sheriff, their fire district, their tax collectors and justices of the peace. Or their school board and local geological abatement officer.

There are umpteen other positions on the ballot next week, with candidates running campaigns with policy platforms and raising money.

Some estimates put the number of elected officials in the USA at more than 500,000.

"When I was voting in Chicago, for example, my ballot was 92 races long," says Alex Niemczewski, the founder of website BallotReady, which collates information about candidates and policies in "down ballot" elections.

Alex Niemczewski's website BallotReady helps voters explore candidates and their policies.

"Everyone I knew then admitted to guessing when they vote for local stuff," she says. "I talked to reporters who admitted they didn't know what certain offices did. I talked to the mayor of Chicago who admitted to not understanding fully which judge he should vote for."

If the mayor doesn't know the candidates, what hope does anyone else have?

"There's not enough local news coverage of local races," Niemczewski says. "Sometimes there's no news coverage … and this means that voters, the first time they're hearing about the candidates is when they see their names on the ballot and they end up guessing or leaving it blank or not voting altogether."

An expensive run for a board position

Bill Roth is running for a board position on the Santa Clara Valley Water District, in the city of San Jose, California.

He says it's a big organisation, with a budget of around $1 billion a year, and 900 employees.

"This is definitely a bucket list item," Roth says. "I've literally taken the year off, I'm basically paying for this out of my retirement, minus what we fundraise."

"This is always something I've wanted to do."

He'd want to be doing it for love, because it's not a lucrative job.

"You get $386 per day that you have meetings, so junior members of the board are making about $30,000," he says. "That is probably about a 95 per cent pay cut to what I was making at the last Silicon Valley company."

Roth has been hitting the pavement in his district, introducing himself to the neighbourhood, virtually every day for months.

Because the brutal fact is that most of the 140,000 people in his electorate don't know the first thing about him. Many of them won't even know what the water district does.

"When you're this down ballot a race, it really is name recognition," Roth says. "If [they] see a name they recognise, they may not know what the water district does, but they go, 'Oh I'll vote for that guy'."

When I ask him if this process leads to the best qualified person getting the job, Roth pauses in thought.

"That's not the right question," he says. "The right question is, does it get the person that most reflects what the people want? That's what it does."

Running for a seat on the bench

A few suburbs away, I catch up with Johnene Stebbins at a campaign event supporting her run for Superior Court Judge, the criminal court for Santa Clara County.

"I'm just trying to give people an opportunity to meet a candidate so that when they look at their ballot they can say, 'Oh, I've actually met her', instead of skipping it all together or just taking a wild guess."

She adds: "No one has heard my name before."

It's becoming a familiar pattern. It's hard for candidates to cut through when they're on the same ballot paper as Donald Trump and Kamala Harris.

Unlike the election for president, this race is non-partisan. There are no parties listed next to candidates' names, and Stebbins says this is an entirely new experience for her.

"This is the first time I've ever engaged in politics at all," she says. "It's all new to me, getting endorsements."

Johnene Stebbins is running for election for judge of the Superior Court of Santa Clara County in California.

The United States is one of very few countries that holds judicial elections. Except in countries like Bolivia, Switzerland and Japan, judges are typically appointed.

And there's a tension between the information voters want to know to decide between candidates, and what the judicial code of ethics permits.

"I've gotten questions about immigration, I've gotten questions about Israel and Gaza — stuff that will never come across my desk," Stebbins says. "It's hard to tell someone I'm not allowed to answer that because it sounds like you're trying to avoid something."

That's one of the reasons that Judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell thinks judicial elections should be abolished.

"Judges are not politicians ," Cordell says. "Judges cannot make promises to voters about what it is they will do when they're presiding over cases."

"The only promise a judge can ever make or a judicial candidate can ever make is to be independent, to be principled, and to uphold the law. That's it. Anything other than that really destroys the integrity of the judiciary."

Cordell used to occupy the seat on the bench that Johnene Stebbins is running for. She is now deeply concerned about the role that money plays in judicial elections.

Judge LaDoris Hazzard Cordell thinks judicial elections should be abolished.

The dollar figures for down ballot races can be eye watering. Stebbins is raising a six-figure sum for her campaign.

Races for statewide Supreme Court positions regularly cost millions of dollars. Last year in Wisconsin, $45 million was spent in the campaign for a single supreme court seat.

"The majority of the money coming into these judicial races comes from the legal community, from lawyers," Cordell says. "In my view, it's just all wrong."

Research also suggests that judicial elections can influence how judges do their jobs, especially in the lead-up to election day. Studies in Pennsylvania and Washington state, for instance, have found that judges become more punitive the closer they are to standing for re-election.

But there are plenty of people in the US who defend the system as it stands.

"If it's a reasonable way to choose your president, I suppose it's a reasonable way to choose judges," Stebbins says. "What I do think is it gives an opportunity for someone to run that might not fit into the political mould that you're looking for [in] appointment."

Judges aren't the only participants in the justice system who are chosen by voters. Some of the lawyers they face in the courtroom also need to get endorsement from the public.

A high-profile race for chief prosecutor

If there's one local race drawing the most attention this election cycle, it might be the one for LA District Attorney, the chief prosecutor in Los Angeles County.

Around 10 million people live in the county, and a fierce campaign is being fought over how best to tackle law and order in the city.

The incumbent District Attorney George Gascón was elected four years ago on a platform of not seeking the death penalty and reducing excessive sentences.

"As a country we have over-incarcerated people for many, many, years and the application of our laws has been generally very racist," Gascón says. "There's a lot of fear mongering, so while crime is down generally, fear is very high."

LA District Attorney George Gascón.

He was challenged by 11 other candidates in the primary election, and his opponent for the general election is criminal lawyer Nathan Hochman.

"The current DA has enacted the most pro-criminal policies in all of DA history," Hochman says. "It has created a sense of fear in society … [that] we have not experienced for years."

This is a high profile and expensive race getting media coverage and televised debates. There are billboards and TV ads running.

"The limit that you can raise in my race is US$2.5 million," Hochman says. "I've got to get TV, radio … then we have social media. We have text with video. We have email, and we have print mail. You use all the forms of communication ."

Still, the candidates admit that name recognition remains a problem. And so the campaign has reverted to party labels.

Criminal lawyer Nathan Hochman.

Gascón has used the fact that he's a Democrat in his campaign material, while using the background of Hochman — who ran as the Republican candidate for state attorney-general two years ago — against him.

For a non-partisan election, it's all very partisan.

Despite the fact that he has been running as a Democrat, Gascón says the politicisation of the race is a consequence of America's polarisation.

"I think it's very detrimental and that's why I'm very hopeful that we will evolve from this place," he says. "I do see light at the end of the tunnel."

When I ask him if this would ideally be an elected position, he answers quickly: "In an ideal world they shouldn't. Certainly judges should not be elected in an ideal world, but 'ideal world' is an abstract term."

He adds: "We have to work with the reality of our environment"

Is it all a bit much?

Americans do their elections big. Lots of races, lots of candidates, and lots of money.

Alex Niemczewski says that "theoretically", it's a great way for citizens to hold local officials accountable.

But practically?

"Sometimes practically," she says. "Hopefully, increasingly more practically."

Evidence shows that turnout is lower in down ballot races, especially when there's no presidential election drawing people to the polls.

Even when people do vote, there's a high likelihood they're not as informed as they could be.

And that's something Niemczewski is trying to help with. Her website BallotReady helps voters explore candidates and their policies by collating the information in one place.

"It is a tonne of work to gather all this information … a lot of it we have to call boards of elections, we have to submit requests via fax," she says.

"There's huge opportunity for the US to improve how we actually do democracy, how we make it work the way that it should."

Just don't suggest the USA could stop holding as many elections as they do.

"Given, I think, that it's impossible that our country will change the way we do elections," Niemczewski says, "I don't think it's worth fantasising about a more easy to access structure of democracy."

By：ABC

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