How many signatures is enough for civic election candidates?

THURSDAY MORNING EDITORIAL — How many signatures should be needed for a municipal candidate’s nomination papers?

The rule in Kamloops has been, just two. Some people think that’s not enough. Running for such an important job should require a higher show of basic support. Others feel it should be as easy as possible to run for elected office.

The reasoning of the first school of thought goes that setting the bar higher will discourage candidates who aren’t all that serious about it. By doing so, the quality of candidates will naturally increase, the numbers will be reduced, and voter turnout will be improved because people will have an easier time figuring out who to vote for.

In practice, none of those things happens. All that does happen is that the staff at City Hall have to spend more time checking out signatures to make sure they’re from people who are eligible to sign.

Most City councillors think 10 is a better number than two but it won’t change anything.

In provincial and federal elections, gathering nomination signatures is important to the party system in order to build party memberships. In Kamloops, which doesn’t have a party system as part of civic elections, it’s not necessary.

Then there’s the Gordon Chow experience. Gordon almost didn’t make it onto the mayoral ballot in the last Kamloops civic election in 2011. He had to catch a ride to City Hall and ask a couple of strangers to sign his papers so he could run.

Sadly, Gordon passed away a few months ago, but he was a fixture in several civic elections. Never a threat, he nonetheless added a sense of the common person to campaigns. And some think that if he hadn’t made it onto the ballot last time, Peter Milobar would not be the mayor today because Chow took just enough votes from Milobar’s closest competitor to allow him re-election.

Is that a testimonial for keeping a lower threshold, or for raising it? Neither, really, but it does show that all candidates can affect the outcome of an election.

Given that requiring more signatures doesn’t seem to result in any improvements to the process, there’s no reason at all to be increasing the number from the current two, though 10 or even 25 shouldn’t be much of a challenge for anyone wanting to run, either.

But let’s not kid ourselves that more signatures are going to suddenly bring more voters to the polls.