City council disregards fairness, law

It may not be a ballot fiasco on the scale of Florida 2000, but Monday night's vote of the Wasilla City Council to fill a council vacancy should alarm city residents for several reasons.

The biggest immediate reason is that one incorrectly filed ballot resulted in the wrong person being awarded a position on the council. But a concern of greater significance is the willingness of elected officials to shirk accountability by conducting public business in private, via a secret ballot, and looking the other way about their own statutory impropriety.

Five seated councilors were tasked Monday with choosing from among four candidates using an electoral process known as the Borda system, in which applicants are ranked according to voter preference and scored inversely - four points for each first-place vote, three for a second-place vote, two for third, and one for fourth. One council member, mayor hopeful Diana Straub, hand-wrote the candidate names in the order of her preference at the bottom of her ballot, then put the corresponding point value in the blanks where she should have listed her ordinal preference. (A picture of her ballot appears on Page A3 of this paper.)

The oversight meant her ballot was scored in reverse of her intent, and the seat was awarded to Verdie Bowen instead of Marty Metiva, as it should have been.

Straub's action was quickly seized on by some as evidence of her unfitness for public office. But her reaction - one of accountability and complete acceptance of responsibility for her mistake - bore more compelling evidence of higher qualities of character all too often absent in the public arena, including with the way this issue is being handled.

Straub's refreshing and laudable reaction stands in stark contrast to the "official" city reaction, which has been to emphasize the mistake, rather than the wrongness of its effect or the process that allowed it. In a matter of great public importance, within the context of a public meeting, the voting was done by secret ballot, in clear violation of the state's Open Meetings Act, which says that votes "shall be conducted in such a manner that the public may know the vote of each person entitled to vote."

Had a proper, in-the-open vote been taken, the mistake would most likely not have been made.

Residents may rightfully wonder why such favor was shown to Bowen, whose council candidacy was rejected by city voters a mere nine months ago. But a bigger, more important question is why a majority of City Council members, elected public servants all, has expressed support for a nonpublic and, indeed, illegal method of voting. Only Straub and fellow councilor Mark Ewing have taken a stand in opposition to it.

Of no less concern is the position of Wasilla Mayor Dianne M. Keller, who calls secret balloting a council decision about which she has no opinion.

But most troubling - and costly - of all, perhaps, is the position of city attorney Tom Klinkner, who says that there is nothing that precludes the use of a secret ballot by the City Council. For the privilege of receiving such inadequate advice, city taxpayers dole out $165 an hour to Klinkner.

Whether it is willing disregard of state law, or just plain ignorance of it, is no matter. No one, elected or otherwise, should need any form of quantified guideline to know what is right and what is wrong.

But since a general sense of fairness appears not to be ruling the day, state law provides for an easy remedy. We call on Keller, Klinkner and the council, therefore, to abide by statute as outlined in the Open Meetings Act and void the illegal vote so that it can be redone properly.