In preparation for election day I recently picked up a voting guide published by the League of Women Voters. The guide outlines each of the races on my local ballot and features profiles and Q&A of each of the candidates who chose to participate. Charlottesville strikes me as a kind of strange place politically - it's very crunchy granola in a lot of ways but also maintains this strict very conservative spine that seems at odds with the very granola-ness.

For example, Charlottesville and Albemarle county boast one of the greatest park systems I've ever seen. The parks are beautifully maintained and offer everything from tennis courts to bike trails to swimming holes. The county and cite parks departments offer swimming lessons, crafts, all kinds of hiking tours and are staffed by some of the most dedicated outdoorspeople I've ever met. The playgrounds are, to a one, clean, bright and safe and I've never seen such well built and outfitted picnic pavillions. Really, it's just great. On the other hand, there is no longer recycling for county residents. That's right, if you don't live in Charlottesville proper then you pretty much throw away all of your trash - even things like soda cans and newspapers that are allowable in even the most limited recycling programs. Apparently, recycling doesn't "pay" in the sense that the county can make money off it and might even have to occasionally fork over money to do it, so the county supervisors put a stop to it.

Anyway, a glance through the voters' guide shows an incredible number of Independent candidates running for local offices (state offices feature only one Independent in nine races and there are no federal office races in Virginia this year). One reason there are so many Independents is that party endorsement entails a kind of cost-share deal. A candidate who raises money in $25 increments through weiner roasts is likely to take a dim view of sending any of that money "upstate" (as we say in New York) to assist candidates in the inner ring D.C. suburbs. So in a sense, all the Independents are keeping Albemarle money in Albemarle. However admirable I find this, it does tend to obscure the essential shorthand that voters may rely on to tell them who's who. I've never believed in voting a party line but it seems to me that learning that someone is a Green, Libertarian, Republican, Democrat or whatever gives you a jumping off point for understanding where he or she is coming from, who they hang with and what they've bought into in order to win office. Even if, say, a Republican candidate is pro-choice you would still get a feel for a general worldview and system of priorities.

All these people seem the same to me and trying to suss out any one person (in the races that are even contested - nine of them are not) to vote for without the shorthand of party affiliation is proving difficult.