Make office non-partisan
Published 4:25 pm Wednesday, January 13, 2010
When you vote in a race for Congress, state Legislature or County Council, knowing the candidates’ party preferences is useful. Same for president, governor and county executive. These are political offices, and party affiliation says something about what matters to the candidates, and where they’ll stand on important issues.
But for other elected offices, especially at the county level, party affiliation is meaningless. It doesn’t matter, for example, whether your county sheriff favors the Democratic, Republican, Libertarian or any other party. The job is elected, but not political. The mission is to fight crime effectively, not to formulate tax policy.
The same holds for the office of county prosecutor. Yet state law makes it the only non-political county office that requires candidates to declare a party preference. One result, which played out here last year, is that county political parties are responsible for nominating three candidates to replace a prosecutor who resigns before his or her term expires. The County Council then picks from that slate.
State Sen. Adam Kline, D-Seattle, thinks that level of party power is misplaced. Precinct committee officers, he argues, have no special knowledge that qualifies them for such a task.
Kline is sponsoring a bill to make county prosecutor a non-partisan office. It failed to get out of the Government Operations &Elections Committee last year, and Kline isn’t optimistic this year will be different. The state parties oppose it, and Kline suspects they may be twisting committee members’ arms.
Lawmakers shouldn’t put party loyalty ahead of such sensible reform. It’s clear citizens prefer that such offices be non-partisan — where they’ve had the chance here and in King County, they’ve removed partisan labels from county elections. They haven’t had that choice when it comes to prosecutors only because it’s technically a state office, and isn’t specifically listed as non-partisan in state law.
As supporters of Kline’s bill testified last year, justice doesn’t have a partisan preference. The role of a prosecutor, in fact, is a-political. Prosecutors work with judges and sheriffs and other attorneys in the interest of justice, not political goals.
Having a partisan label on the office surely makes voters wonder whether politics enters into prosecutors’ decisions — which they never should. They never have for former Snohomish County Prosecutor Janice Ellis, a Democrat, or King County Prosecutor Dan Satterberg, a Republican, both strong supporters of Kline’s bill.
This law is archaic. The fact that it’s still on the books qualifies as an oversight. It’s time for lawmakers to fix it.
