An election and a correction

If you read the editorial in this newspaper's April 3 edition, you should have cause for concern. Red Willow County has a population of 11,055 people with 7,144 of them being registered voters.

Of that number, 2,826 of them are registered with a party affiliation other than Republican. But because all four candidates for Red Willow County Sheriff registered as Republicans, almost 40 percent of the registered voters in this county won't have a role in selecting our new sheriff because they can't vote in the primary.

Reading through the maze of requirements and exceptions to voting provided by Red Willow County Clerk Pauletta Gerver is confusing at best and bewildering at worst. There's no doubt that many people will show up at the polls expecting to vote for the County Sheriff and will be denied that opportunity because of state law.

We have the only state legislature in the country that elects its members on a nonpartisan basis. One of Bob Kerrey's campaign planks during his ill-fated run for U.S. Senator during the last campaign was to propose that we elect our Congressmen the same way. The Unicameral was the brainchild of George Norris from McCook and, even though we've had it for decades, if it was really that good of an idea, I've always wondered why no other state has adopted it.

On the other hand, if there was ever a reason for an election to be nonpartisan, surely electing a sheriff that way would be at the top of the list. He or she is the chief law enforcement officer of the county and represents all the people all the time, not just the members of one political party. I've long believed there are far better ways to become a sheriff than making the candidates become politicians because that's what they are. Sheriff's should be selected on merit by qualified people who test them, check their backgrounds and insure that they have the necessary experience to do the job. When we go vote, we tend to vote for candidates we like rather than the one who is most qualified.

But electing sheriffs is firmly entrenched in American society and it's done all across the United States except Alaska which has no counties and, consequently, has no sheriffs and Connecticut which abolished sheriffs in 2000. As we all know, the more entrenched something is, the harder it is to change so any proposal to take selecting a sheriff out of the political arena is likely to fail. But surely, a proposal to make the election of a sheriff nonpartisan instead of partisan would appeal to a great many people of all political persuasions. I was talking to a friend of mine earlier this week who asked me who I was going to vote for in the sheriff's race. I told him I couldn't vote in the race because I wasn't a registered Republican and, of course, he already knew that. He said he had asked me that for a reason because even though he's a hard-core Republican, he didn't think it was right for just a segment of the population to elect a person who has to serve everyone.

I agreed with him and would still feel that way if I lived in a county dominated by Democrats. Politicians typically handle political issues and we know how that process works, or just as often, doesn't work but sheriffing's a horse of a different color. A job that requires that everyone be treated equally and fairly under the law is led by a politician first and a law enforcement officer second rather than the other way around. That's why when a new sheriff is elected, they typically clean house, firing all the deputies that served under the old sheriff and replacing them with people they know, like and trust, even though those people may have no law enforcement experience at all. With every job there's a learning curve and being a law enforcement officer is no different. You have to crawl before you walk and as we've seen right here in our own county, some new deputies never got beyond the crawling stage.

For those of you in the community who are civic minded and politically active, making the election of our sheriff nonpartisan is an issue you should get behind and support.

The cryptic response I hear too often these days is that there's no way we're going to do a particular thing because it makes too much sense. Electing a sheriff in a nonpartisan election certainly makes more sense than the way we do it now and if it's changed, it would benefit ALL the people.

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Finally, I must print a correction to part of my column last week about hospital ratings. I stated that McCook's Community Hospital received a negative rating on readmissions when, in fact, that rating was positive. I misread the colored symbols, thinking that red indicated a negative rating and black a positive one when the opposite was true. I apologize for my error.