Say you beat a sitting county commissioner on Tuesday. Can you show up at the next commission meeting and take their chair?
Well, you can show up. There’s usually a perfectly good chair for you in the audience.
I’ve been thinking about that little stretch between Election Day and the day somebody new takes office. We spend months talking about who’s going to win. Then, somewhere between the victory speech and the next commission meeting, we get to the question that actually matters if you have business before the county. Who gets to vote on my road?
The Greeks had a thought about this. In his “Politics,” Aristotle described an idea that people in the democracies of his day associated with freedom. Citizens should get “to rule and be ruled in turn.” He was writing about Greek city-states more than 2,300 years ago, but that last bit still gets me. Everybody likes the idea of getting a turn. How do you feel about it when your turn is over?
Our Founders had to find out in a hurry. The Constitution gave the president a four-year term. George Washington chose to go home after two terms, years before there was a constitutional limit. Four years later, John Adams had to do something harder. He had to go home after the voters turned him out.
As historian Sara Georgini tells it, Adams left Washington before dawn on March 4, 1801, the day Thomas Jefferson would take the oath. It had been a bitter election. Jefferson and his own running mate, Aaron Burr, tied in the Electoral College, and the House took 36 ballots to settle it. Adams skipped the inauguration. Jefferson took office anyway. For the first time in the young republic, the presidency passed from one political party to another.
Political scientist Adam Przeworski put it about as plainly as anybody could. “Democracy is a system in which parties lose elections.” What matters is what happens to the people who lose. They give up the office, and they’re still free to speak up, organize, and try again. There will be another election, and the people who won this time will have to face the voters, too.
Now back to that chair.
There are three separate things going on after an election. Election workers finish counting. Officials review the returns and make the results official, a process called the canvass. Then the person who won takes office according to the rules for that job. In Nevada, a newly elected county commissioner takes up the duties of office on the first Monday in January. This time that’s Jan. 4. Under the 20th Amendment, the people elected to the U.S. House start their terms at noon Eastern time on Jan. 3. Same November ballot. Different January dates.
So if your road is on the county commission’s agenda in December, the commissioners serving in December are the ones who can vote on it. The incoming commissioner can read the packet, talk to people, and start learning why that particular stretch of road has been on the agenda six times. Meanwhile, the county still has bills to pay and roads to plow.
I think we’re lucky that this can be so ordinary. We can spend a whole year arguing over who ought to run things and settle the question by counting ballots. Then somebody serves out their term, somebody else takes the oath, and the county goes on plowing the road.
Come January, there may be a new person in that chair. If you voted for the other candidate, you could still walk into the meeting, take your three minutes at the microphone, and ask what they plan to do about your road. It’s your government, too.
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