Hi friend,
This year’s local elections were relatively calm, other than the fact that my town’s mayoral race was a grudge match between two longstanding foes. There were no ballot initiatives, no state races. No way to register disapproval of the shenanigans happening in the Iowa State Capitol with the governor’s dramatic swing toward extreme right-wing policies like abortion bans (currently stayed pending appeal) and school vouchers (a blatant move to transfer hundreds of millions of dollars from public schools to for-profit entities).1
Anyway. On the local front, voter turnout was approximately 20%. Many of the races were unopposed. My town’s mayoral race was the only contested mayor’s race in the county.
Because of our low population densities, some races only received a few votes. At my secret society meeting last night, I jokingly congratulated a woman whose son won his city council race. He lives in a town of ~70 people, ran for reelection unopposed, and got six votes. We were mostly able to guess which six people in town bothered to show up at the polls.
Now that the election is over, people across the county are receiving calls from the county auditor congratulating them on winning their election.
But some of those calls are going to people who weren’t on the ballot, didn’t run, and didn’t intend to seek public office.
I find this utterly hilarious. Somehow our local government is like jury duty, or the draft — a vague, forgotten threat until a notice shows up in your mailbox dragging you into service.
Before I explain how to win an election without running, let me share some numbers:
In my county, there are around 6500 people.
4000 are registered voters.
Our land area is 525 square miles, which is about the same size as Marin County in California. But Marin’s real estate tax base is $40B, per wikipedia, and we can barely afford to keep the library open, so that’s where the similarities end.
There are ~152 elected positions across the county. This includes county supervisors, the sheriff, mayors, city councils, township trustees, school boards, hospital board, soil and conservation board, agriculture extension, and various other county positions.
With only 4000 registered voters, that means that 3.8% of the county’s voting population is an elected official at any given time.
In our smallest town, which has four elected offices and <40 people to fill them, 11% of the population has to serve in city government, or the city risks being forced to disband.
The rural areas are divided into sixteen townships, each approximately 30 square miles and home to less than 200 people each. Those people still require services, even if the country schools disappeared long ago and kids now spend an hour or more each way on school buses.
Around here, being the mayor is not a glamorous gig. The mayor isn’t paid. There isn’t enough money to fund any of our towns (especially now, thanks to statewide shenanigans), and the budget is always a headache. The meetings are mostly formalities, interspersed with salty complaints from citizens about the city or their neighbors. Even I have gone to a city council meeting to complain about a neighbor’s cows (which I still maintain are bullshit, pun intended), and I can virtually guarantee I will do so again despite my fear of turning into a Karen.
In the rural areas, there isn’t a city government, but there are township trustees. That job is less onerous — it’s mostly a couple of meetings a year to discuss the minuscule budget, all of which goes toward funding the volunteer fire department and maintaining old cemeteries tucked back on forgotten dirt roads. Occasionally, trustees have to settle a fence dispute between hostile neighbors — especially if livestock escaped and caused damage — but otherwise, it’s not terrible.
But because these jobs are mostly headaches with limited chance for either advancement or nepotism, it’s hard to find candidates. Most people run because they want to improve something (often one specific thing, like a park or road), or because they don’t like the person currently in office (often personally dislike, sometimes in multi-generational feuds).
Sometimes, though, no one runs.
And when that happens, the write-ins become crucial.
In a race with no candidates, write-ins decide the race. Often there will be two or three names written in. Sometimes, one write-in from one person will be enough to win.
When there’s a tie, such as three write-ins for three different people, it doesn’t make sense to call a special election to break the tie. We don’t have money for that. Instead, the auditor draws a write-in name out of a hat and declares them the winner.
This happened to my dad once, which is how he became a township trustee. It happened to a friend of my brother’s. It’s happening this week to one town’s mayor and three other city council seats around the county.
I was safe from the write-in election this year, since my town’s grudge match2 meant there were enough candidates (and also meant I had zero desire to run myself).
But elected office, like death and taxes, comes for you here eventually. We’ll see if I last another cycle before I find myself in office.
Cheers,
Sara
p.s. if there is something you’re dying to know about rural Iowa, my writing, or anything else, leave a comment or send me an email!
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I am watching with some schadenfreude as the Moms for Liberty-endorsed school board candidates lost almost every single race they ran in in Iowa, and as the governor’s national political aspirations are likely destroyed, unless DeSantis wins. From the grumbling I’m hearing locally, the governor may have overestimated her power. But 2024 is going to feel like a lifetime, so I won’t go deeper today.
Results of the grudge match: one faction was reelected as mayor, but another faction got a seat on city council. I look forward to reading newspaper reports of these meetings going forward.
Also, their grudge match is ongoing and related to (1) a junkyard in town where someone allegedly burns hazardous materials late at night, (2) choices made over how to use insurance money to repair some city property destroyed in a tornado last year, (3) family relations who may or may not have embezzled from the water department. The usual small town stuff, really.
Big same here. It comes for you eventually.