Voters, look out ahead

Score one for Peter Ward.

Mr. Ward, of Spirit Lake, took exception in his My Turn column Saturday to The Press's position on voter apathy. While numbers tell a stark story about how the vast majority of Kootenai County adults refuse to participate in local elections, Ward is correct in his belief that this needn't be the case - at least, not to the depressing levels we've all seen over the years.

"There are many informed, knowledgeable citizens that just don't have time to devote to attending meetings and rallies (or polling stations) to express their feelings, but that doesn't mean that they are ignorant, don't care, or don't have an opinion," he wrote. And you know what? He's right.

While Mr. Ward might have been writing more about advisory votes than binding legal votes, more needs to be done to encourage prospective voters to participate. From our end, that means providing as much information as we can in a format that is most likely to be noticed and absorbed.

Toward that goal, The Press will follow up on last spring's experiment, which we consider successful. For the first time, we published profiles of all the candidates for school board elections on the front page and into the A section of the paper prior to the election. In previous elections, we provided quite a bit of information on all the contested races, but we put it all in a special section that was inserted deep into the paper. It's our belief that many prospective voters never saw those one-time sections, and for those who did, the candidate profiles were not as informative as they could or should have been.

That's why next week, Tuesday through Friday, The Press will dedicate the A section of the paper to profiles on candidates for contested races in Post Falls, Spirit Lake, Dalton Gardens, Hauser, Huetter, Harrison, Athol and Coeur d'Alene. These profiles are more extensive and, we believe, informative than the questionnaire format we'd used for years.

All the information in the world won't get some people away from reality TV and Facebook long enough to actually learn about their community and shape its future, but for everyone else, our aim is to make those papers indispensable. The profiles will also be posted on cdapress.com, which is a free site available to anyone with Internet access.