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27
Apr 2007
Let the people pick
Posted by Scott Spielman
at 4:00 PM | Comments
I’m growing more and more concerned about the reaction from Mark Slavens, a candidate for the Plymouth-Canton Community School Board.
Slavens was appointed to a judgeship last week. The vacancy he applied for—and you have to apply, at the very, very least—opened in January and yet he didn’t disclose that he was in the mix for the judicial post during candidate interviews.
Now he’s agreed to step down from the board—after May 8—but has not given any indication that he’ll take down his campaign signs or encourage people to vote for candidates who will actually be around to be sworn in in July.
“My name will be on the ballot for the May 8th election, and people have the right to vote for whoever they want to,” he said in a story for our paper. “If I was elected (the board) then would pick a person to fill that position for a year.” (The next school election.)
It’s true that voters still have the right to vote for whom they choose and if they want to throw away their vote, they can do so.
To me, though, the fact that Slavens will not take down campaign signs or encourage voters to pick someone else amounts to an attempt to disenfranchise them. It’s bad enough that he lied to the public when he stated, in our paper and elsewhere, that he wasn’t using the school board as a stepping stone to higher office. To me this says that he doesn’t care about voters in the district.
I think that’s a reprehensible statement, given that thousands of absentee ballots have already gone out. It’s such a rare thing to see a full field of qualified candidates—and then some—for a school board election today.
This kind of action will only serve to turn more people off on the political process.
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