For petitions, for markets: Let's dust off the rules, and play it by the book

The devil is in the details, the old saw goes, and for local candidate hopeful Daniel Hare, that certainly does seem to be true. And if our local voter registration and elections office had not been cautioned to observe the letter of the law in regard to Hare's petition for candidacy, what kind of mess would it be in now?

According to another old saw, rules are made to be broken, but living by that credo seems to invite a cosmic backslap from the hand that guides us. Bear witness to the financial morass that so many of America's institutional lenders and insurers are trudging through, and dragging us into. There are rules against “under-capitalization,” or in other words, letting your mouth make promises your *bleep* can't keep.

There are rules about how much debt on a lender's books can be of a certain category of risk. There are rules about how much money the lender must keep to back up obligations. There are also ways to evade the rules. Can anyone say “credit default swap?” Sure we can. Most of us just recently learned about them and how they have corroded our financial security in this country.

But predating credit default swaps, or even the term under-capitalization, America had voting, and candidates. Petitions have been around for time immemorial and so perhaps that is why, in the words of local Election Commission Director Brenda Rogers, “This has been discussed and the consensus is that since this minimal information has been accepted in the past (as early as 2000), we cannot reject Mr. Hare's petition on this basis without appearing to be discriminatory.” Ahhh, and there's the rub.

This is a dilemma we are familiar with here at the paper, you make a rule, you must stand by that rule for everyone-or no one. If you don't, you can be accused of favoritism. Heck, you will probably be accused anyway, but at least you can sleep if you know you have done your best to be fair. What this statement tells us is that locally when it comes to vetting petitions and their signatures, we have not always done our best.

There were questions raised about the validity of signatures on Hare's petition, a petition that nearly landed him on the ballot without a proper inspection. Well apparently the state's law enforcement division thinks there was definitely a reason to distrust the honor system in this case. A recent petition to put a video poker/property tax swap on the ballot also flunked the vetting process, although without the spectacular legal ramifications that forgery earned Hare.

Sure, we can see how this seems like a witchhunt to Hare and his supporters. As Rogers fully admitted, plenty of petitions submitted in the past were not inspected properly before a candidate was put on the ballot. But we all desperately need guidelines to be followed, both here at home and on the federal stage. Playing fast and loose with the rules seems to bring nothing but grief.

The days of doing business on a handshake, be it government or otherwise, are long behind most of us-or they should be, it's only fair.

“To be sure, we will be more diligent in this area for all future petitioners, but we cannot place ourselves in a position that would appear biased at best,” Rogers said. We certainly hope so, and feel that lack of bias will be best accomplished by following the rules-for everyone.