Few new names bode ill for turnout: Morgantown City Council ballot features three uncontested races April 30

The race is on and it looks like the status quo might once again live up to its name.
The deadline Monday for filing to seek seats on Morgantown’s City Council came and went with hardly a pop.
Judging by the list of 11 candidates vying for council’s seven seats April 30 — barring a scandal — it looks to be more of the same.
Eight of the 11 candidates are incumbents or former council members while another ran a low-profile campaign for the House of Delegates last year.
Another candidate is fresh off an 18-year run on the Monongalia County Board of Education while only one of the 11 has never sought public office before.
Meanwhile, only one current council member is not seeking re-election.
We are often torn between not encouraging anyone to become a candidate for fear they might win and being discouraged by some who should, but do not run. Not to mention, the disappointment that comes when so few do run for political office it results in uncontested races.
The winners of three City Council seats are already determined by virtue of that latter scenario.
It’s said time is the only fortune teller and far be it from us to attempt to predict the turnout for these four City Council contests or who wins.
Yet, the data for the last dozen or more Morgantown City Council races regarding voter turnout is not lost on us.
Only three municipal elections in Morgantown have resulted in more than 20 percent of eligible voters casting ballots and none have topped the 30 percent mark.
The vast majority of the turnout in these elections is typically measured in the teens while some did not even break single digits.
Our newspaper intends to once again interview the candidates for contested seats — all eight of them — and endorse four of them or not.
Whether our community will ever produce a host of qualified candidates again in every ward in the future is a good question. And whether half of Morgantown’s 18,000 eligible voters will cast a ballot in one is another one.
Clearly, the answer to either of those questions is not nearly as good
Some have suggested piggybacking our municipal election onto the county’s ballot in general elections to boost turnout and save money.
Kingwood is going to run this idea past its voters in its municipal election in June. We are curious to see how that turns out and hope that a majority of eligible voters decide this matter.
There are plenty of good reasons a majority of Morgantown’s eligible voters should turn out this spring.
But the best one remains unchanged — it’s still a privilege to elect our leaders.