OK, candidates, fork over those e-mail addresses

OK, here we go again.

Didn't we just finish with an election? I know we must have, as our new DuPage County Board chairman, Dan Cronin, will be sworn in Monday night.

But if you've been keeping score, you'll have noticed that, due to some election law apparently aimed at producing even more elections, candidates last week were filing for offices in communities where, if enough candidates file, we can have a runoff election to narrow the field before the real election occurs.

The DuPage County towns eligible for such early filing are Aurora, Downers Grove, Naperville and Wheaton. And I say, bless the election gods for not producing enough candidates to create one of those runoffs; we've got more than enough to do to get ready for, at least at the Daily Herald, anyway. April marks the granddaddy of elections: contests for local municipal, school, park and library boards, fire prevention districts and, oh, maybe a referendum or two will pop up on the ballot.

Now, the populace doesn't necessarily see the value of these local elections; turnout is historically lousy, especially compared to a presidential race. But there's little debate on whether anything tops the volume and proximity of our local elections.

Candidate filing in the majority of our communities begins Dec. 13 and ends Dec. 20. Based on the results we ran four years ago when the same offices were up for election we have the prospect of more than 100 contested races in April.

Ah, but the local citizenry can be an apathetic lot, also in terms of running for local office. Again, if history is any judge, roughly half of these races will be uncontested. I predict we'll have a few, as we always do, instances in which there are fewer candidates than offices available.

This winnowing of candidates takes other forms as well. Inevitably, one candidate's supporters may try to bounce an opponent off the ballot based on, depending on your point of view, some arcane technicality, or the inability of someone who wants to represent you being incapable of filling out the candidate paperwork correctly.

All of this may not be the best for democracy, but it's not the worst news for harried editors trying to figure out how to do a respectable job of letting their readers know who's running and what they stand for.

That's why, even though candidate filing does not start for more than a week, we've been in the gettin' ready mode for a while now. One of the key things we do is ask our candidates to reply to a questionnaire, which we plan to publish in its entirety online and as much as possible in print.

To that end, those 100 or so offices have been parceled out among every reporter, editor and news clerk in this newsroom. Our first mission is to talk to the person in charge of election filing in their respective government and asking him or her to ask the candidates who file to provide their e-mail addresses along with any other info they're required to provide. This enables us to e-mail the questionnaires to the candidates in a timely fashion and publish their answers in time to help the electorate make an informed choice.

So, it's at this point that I make my semiannual plea of candidates and the people keeping track of them:

Please help us help DuPage residents make an informed choice in April by coughing up those e-mail addresses when filing starts Dec. 13.Thank you in advance.

jdavis@dailyherald.com