Nonpartisan vote closer to reality

Organizers of an effort to change the way Kinston elects its legislators are closer to getting their proposal on November's ballot.

Stephen LaRoque, one of the leaders of this effort, said organizers are less than 100 signatures short of the approximately 1,425 needed to get the proposal - which asks city voters if they want elected positions to be non-partisan - on the ballot. More than 1,000 people signed the petition during Tuesday's primary election.

"I feel pretty confident that we'll get the rest of the signatures," LaRoque said. Organizers will try to get the rest of the signatures this weekend, he said.

Kinston is one of a handful of communities in North Carolina that require candidates for elected office to run under a party banner. An effort to change that gained traction before last November's municipal elections when only four people - including three incumbents - ran for three seats on the Kinston City Council.

Organizers of changing Kinston's election process pointed to much smaller communities like La Grange and Pink Hill - which had a full slate of candidates last year - as evidence that having non-partisan elections could attract more candidates. La Grange and Pink Hill do not require candidates to run under a party banner.

Petitions were first made available during the early voting period before Tuesday's primary. LaRoque said people were slow to sign at first, believing that signing the petition meant a person supported non-partisan elections.

Once people realized that a signature only meant it gets on the ballot, more people were quick to sign, LaRoque said.

"Some people who did early voting actually came back Tuesday to sign the petition," LaRoque said.

The petition will likely be delivered to the Lenoir County Board of Elections next week for review. After elections officials inspect the petition to make sure the signatures come from people who live in the city limits, it will be returned to LaRoque.

Once the council gets the petition, it has to schedule a vote within 60-120 days. LaRoque said he won't deliver the petitions to the council until July at the earliest so the measure can be on the ballot for the Nov. 4 general election.

"I don't want to have a special election just for this, so I'll probably sit on it for a couple of months," he said.

 Charlie Kraebel can be reached at (252) 559-1074 or ckraebel@freedomenc.com. Check out Charlie's blogs at http://ckraebel.encblogs.com.