Our Observation

Just minutes before the closing of election qualifying in Winter Park, the vote for mayor was looking to be already decided. More than two months before Election Day, voters were wondering if there would be an election at all.

Nobody had pulled paperwork to file for candidacy to take on incumbent Mayor Ken Bradley. Winter Park City Clerk Cindy Bonham said candidates are much less likely to begin the paperwork during the election-qualifying week. If nobody had done so by the time the city’s election qualifying week started, odds were that nobody was going to.

In short, the mayor was on the verge of getting a free pass.

But then something unusual happened with less than 30 minutes separating Bradley from winning his second term without receiving a single vote, someone signed up to challenge him.

Nancy Miles’ candidacy was an unlikely one until those final minutes, but the former Salem, Conn., School Board member and voter registration worker gave Winter Park residents a choice they otherwise wouldn’t have had.

And it’s the idea of a choice that separates us from what we tried to escape in forming America in the first place. We want representation in exchange for our taxation. If we give our elected representatives a free pass to reign without fear of a public rebuke, they may begin acting more for their own interests than ours.

That’s the fear when we lose popular representation: Autocracy may take over, under the guise of democracy. Vote-rigging, intimidation tactics and other back-room politics have reared their ugly head in Central Florida’s history, making elections non-elections.

Of course that type of worst-case scenario isn’t likely in its purest form, especially in a functioning democracy at a local level. It’s too easy to see the effects if a city’s coffers are allowed to run dry, the roads fall apart and workers are given pink slips.

A veiled culture of autocracy isn’t the only reason a public official could go unchallenged in an election. A popular incumbent may not see any challengers simply by virtue of their popularity alone. Before his first term, Bradley ran for mayor promising to increase the city’s general fund. Though that sort of effort required concerted work from the Commission, city manager and city staff, the end result is the same: The general funds increased. That’s reason to cheer.

But in a country where good frequently isn’t good enough, it’s fair enough to speculate that we could be even better off than we are now; hence the vital need to have real elections, regardless of the popularity of the incumbent. It’s the only way that we can decide what and who represents us. Otherwise we run the risk of elected officials representing themselves.