A voter who wants information on local elections–especially the Chapel Hill-Carrboro School Board–should go directly to the outstanding election guide at Indyweek.com. The guide contains both news articles and the results of questionnaires answered by the candidates. The information is easy to find and use.

While both the Chapel Hill News and the Carrboro Citizen have given considerable ink to the local elections, it is difficult to find basic information about the candidates. Searches turn up many stories with little way of comparing candidates via bios and views on current issues. As expected, most stories are about the contested Chapel Hill council elections.

The Daily Tar Heel has an easy-to-use voters guide, but it lacks information on the school board elections.

The Orange County Board of Elections web site has a complete list of candidate filings, of course, but links to the candidates are for email addresses, not candidate web sites.

What about local blogs? OrangePolitics.org has the usual comment from a handful of local activists. A new blog, Chapel Hill Watch, takes a more moderate approach and contains some interesting discussion about local politics and local news media. Neither blog is much help in comparing candidates.

All indications are the local elections next week will set a new record for low voter turnout. That is the fault of voters, who have the responsibility of getting informed about each candidate and then getting themselves to the polls. Indy did a professional job of helping voters find needed information on the candidates. Posted by Leroy Towns

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 1st, 2009 at 3:54 pm and is filed under Elections, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.