Ladies and gentlemen, once again:
George Carlin — “The game is rigged… but nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care.” And because nobody seems to care, the game will remain rigged.
I’ve accused our election system of being biased in favor of incumbents for a long time, but this week I picked up another good local example that I’m right.
Watson Township had no one file in the primary for the trustee’s seat being vacated by veteran board member Rod Zeinstra. But a cursory check on the Allegan County Clerk’s web site shows that Planning Commission Chairwoman Michelle Harris will seek the post as a Republican. Two others, with no party affiliation, Candy Adrianson and Jim Lautenschleger, also will be on the ballot.
The reason why I think this is unfair is that Harris, who won her ballot position with 24 write-in votes, is taking advantage of the likelihood a Republican will get a pretty solid number of votes because straight-ticket voting has been upheld in the courts. Those who vote for Donald Trump at the top of the ticket or Mary Whiteford for state representative are more than likely to press “the big R” on election day.
That means Harris is likely to pick up a lot of votes because straight-party voting has remained legal.
Harris has done absolutely nothing illegal here. She’s stepped up to the plate to fill an opening, but she has taken advantage of patterns of voter behavior. To be sure, Watson is one of the most Democratic townships in Allegan County, but solid number of Republican votes seem guaranteed on Nov. 8.
This is a lot like that awful process every six years when the winner by plurality in the primary gets the big nearly $500,000 prize of being state representative for six years in Lansing. Republican Steve Johnson earned less than one-third of the primary vote for 72nd District State Representative, but now he’s the odds-on favorite to win the seat because so many Republicans vote straight ticket.
Cindy Gamrat won the 2014 GOP primary for the 80th District, even though she didn’t have 50 percent support from the district. No matter. She went on to win handily over the all-too-often hapless Democrat opponent. Less than a year afterward she was expelled from Lansing.
There are other places in the world that force the top two vote-getters to face each other in a runoff, kinda like the semifinal round before the finals. In these parts, once you win the primary, you take all the marbles because of the stubborn behavior of Allegan County voters who just can’t bring themselves to vote for a Democat, unless it’s Jim Blanchard over African American Bill Lucas in the 1986 race for governor.
Yes, I am suggesting that voters in the county are racist because this was the only time since 1932 that a Democrat carried Allegan County. What a coincidence the Republican was black!
I’ve been saying for quite a spell that our so-called democratic system is in deep do-do, because certain promoters of the status quo are very good at marketing their strategy of “We like things the way they are around here. Let’s keep it that way. Vote Republican.”
Works almost every time.