Published: November 02, 2009 03:08 pm      

Don’t let others decide your future | Polls open at 7 a.m., close at 8 p.m.

If voter turnout today is as dismal as officials are predicting, we as Americans should all be ashamed.

Please don’t let it happen.

Let your voices be heard.

Set aside 15 minutes of your day and stop at your polling place and vote your conscience.

Today’s election includes statewide judgeship races – which are very important – but is, for the most part, about filling local offices.

We’ll be electing people who will be making decisions that matter most to us individually – about taxes and ordinances, and about our children’s schooling.

The most optimistic official in the Cambria-Somerset region is Fred R. Smith, Cambria’s election supervisor, who is hoping 37 percent of the county’s registered voters will go to the polls.

That stinks.

But it gets much worse:

The party chiefs for Cambria’s Republican and Democratic parties are expecting only 20-25 percent turnouts, while Somerset County’s election supervisor is predicting it won’t go above 20 percent.

Much of the focus in Somerset County will be on electing a county prothonotary and choosing school directors and people to run our borough and township governments.

Cambria has some hotly contested races.

Cambria voters will select two new county judges; a controversial building proposal has raised much debate in the Central Cambria School District; and four council positions and the mayoral post are up for grabs in the financially strapped city of Johnstown.

All of those issues and positions should especially capture voter interest.

Unfortunately, despite the importance, it’s hard to get voters excited about the statewide judgeship races.

“These candidates will not be known to the voters. They won’t recognize their names, let alone what they stand for,” G. Terry Madonna, a political analyst at Franklin & Marshall College, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

Voters will base their decisions on such factors as name recognition, party and gender, instead of qualifications, ideology or endorsements.

And while that is a shame, most officials we’ve talked to still believe, as we do, that electing judges for the Commonwealth, Superior and Supreme courts is better than seating them through appointments, where backroom politics can play a role in deciding who ascends to the bench.

Two places voters might want to check:

* www.votesmart.org, the Web site for Project Vote Smart, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization.

* www.pavotesmart.com, where you can find the Pennsylvania Bar Association’s reviews and the candidates’ questionnaires.

We hope our readers have done their homework. We’ve certainly tried to help by interviewing and writing about candidates and the issues, both on our news pages and on our editorial pages.

In any case, the time is here.

Don’t let others’ votes and others’ candidates decide your future – at least not without you making an effort to have your say.

Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.