The easiest way to make sure your appointed, crony friends are "re-elected"
to help you boss the Community is to make sure no one else runs!
=>
If there
are 4 positions and only your 4 friends run, why then it would be very hard to
lose.
In this commentary, we will look at how the incumbents, with the assistance of the County Bureaucrat, withheld information from the Community.
=> with the effect of keeping the open positions and deadlines a secret.
In the May 2006, May 2007, and September 2008 Villages
elections, the mantra was
"get the Community involved, keep the Community
informed".
This included:
The current incumbent officers/leaders, Chair DSM, Vice Chair BOG, former Chair SOS, and County Bureaucrat VJG, had active roles in past elections. (please note that code names are used to protect the innocent). The entire leadership has been on the Board since the first election, there can be no valid argue that they "didn't know".
The leadership also knows very well that they have a duty to the community to make this election open, communicated, and fair. If you attend any of their meetings, they pontificate at length about keeping the community trust and how they are required to do it.
Anything besides open, honest communication is not only a violation the Community Trust...
but also their personal "word" and trust, that they have repeatedly give to the Community.
Actually, the 4 incumbent cronies somehow knew and managed to file to retain their positions.
=> Side Note: well, maybe. Since 2 out of the 3 statements from the newbie incumbents were identically the same as what they give to the County Bureaucrat in September 2007, it is not clear that they actually filed for their positions or that the County Bureaucrat VJG just filed for them... after the deadline?
What the incumbent cronies and board leadership didn't do is clearly a much longer list than what they did.
In other words, they seemed to sit back, stay quiet, and hope no one noticed. One Community Member did happen to find out a couple days before and file, but, as we shall see, they had "ways of dealing with them".
So, the simplest way to "stay in power" is to simple make sure no one else is even a candidate. Keeping the Community in the dark, while it may violate your flowery words, is very effective, and, after the election, who can do anything (just look at Zimbabwe).
It is especially effect if you can get the County Bureaucrat to help, the County Commissioners don't seem to care about it