On the first day of early voting in September, there was a bit of a logjam outside the FXBG City Center, which serves as the city’s lone in-person polling site until Nov. 1.
Now, you might be thinking this was due to some incredible or unpredictable voter turnout. One local candidate, however, assured me that this was not the case.
Instead, this candidate reported observing clumps of voters posted up in the lobby. They were hunched over, looking at their smartphones, frantically looking up information on local candidates. Cramming for a real-world Civics exam, if you will.
I’ll admit that, for years, I was one of those voters. On the short walk to the Dorothy Hart Community Center (our polling station for the past several years), my wife and I would compare notes.
While we generally knew our choices for national and statewide positions (the ones with the Ds and Rs next to the names), we were pretty clueless about anything local.
Best-case scenario, cursory “research” would inform our choices on these “downballot” races; worst case, we’d leave them blank.
That’s exactly what the Fredericksburg Free Press is trying to prevent in the future. It’s why we spent the month of September organizing a four-pack of local candidate forums in Spotsylvania, Stafford and King George Counties and the City of Fredericksburg.
One of our goals — clearly articulated in our mission statement — is to keep citizens informed and promote civic engagement. And what better way to be engaged than to hear directly from the candidates vying to represent you?
It wasn’t enough to merely let our audience hear candidates’ responses; we needed to let you have a say in the questions and topics at hand. We approached this in a couple of ways; soliciting forum questions on social media (namely Reddit and Facebook) and by attaching a Google Form to our daily newsletter over the course of nearly two months.
And you showed up. The forums were all well attended, with audiences numbering around 70-80 people for the forums held in Spotsylvania, Stafford and Fredericksburg. We streamed the events to our Facebook page, effectively increasing our audience reach by several hundred.
Audience members listen during a forum for Spotsylvania County candidates in September at Germanna Community College.
We didn’t do it alone. We got a crucial assist in hosting the forums from local groups such as Delta Sigma Sorority and Omega Psi Phi Fraternity. They provided volunteers and helped to promote the forums using their platforms in the community.
While your feedback was overwhelmingly positive, we’ve also taken notes on how to improve when hosting future events. For one, our streaming capabilities will be improved the next time folks take the stage. We’re also cooking up civic events that focus on other aspects of civic engagement, such as deepening and diversifying candidate pools.
If you haven’t yet, I encourage you to watch back footage from your locality’s forum, which can be found on our Facebook page (and also embedded in various election stories).
After all, no one wants to be the person taking up bandwidth — physical and otherwise — in the lobby at the polling station. It’s a fire hazard.
