Once again it’s Election Day, and once again, we urge you in the strongest terms possible to exercise your democratic right and get out to the polls. But don’t stop reading here, because with the twin debacles of the District 5 Dane County Board and state Supreme Court races, things are a little different today.

Excising the “Frankenstein veto,” which currently allows the governor to stitch together unrelated words and numbers in budgetary legislation, is a worthy and sufficient reason to vote. But we cannot endorse anyone for the contested races on the rest of the District 5 ballot.

In the County Board race, this is simply because both Wyndham Manning and Conor O’Hagan have yet to prove they are fit for office. Between Mr. O’Hagan’s frankly alarming “Economic Development Plan” and Mr. Manning’s inability to reason out much beyond an arts and lake-cleanup program, District 5 deserves better in a time when the County Board is trying to sell voters on a $200 million Regional Transit Authority.

It is not the qualifications of the state Supreme Court candidates that give us pause, but the retread of last year’s mudslinging between interest groups over Justice Annette Ziegler and opponent Linda Clifford. To endorse either Burnett County Judge Michael Gableman or incumbent Justice Louis Butler would be to implicitly endorse a judicial selection process that by its very nature cannot engender substantive debate. Justices should be held to their experience and recommendation of their peers, not elected on a trumped-up ideological bent.

In elections without a national race to pique the average citizen’s interest, voter turnout usually plummets, which is why it’s all the more essential to make your voice heard. Sure, cliches like “every vote counts” lose their potency when they’re trotted out every few months, but far better that than the caveats this election has forced upon this board. While most students’ ballots will have three contested items on it, we cannot in good conscience encourage anything but a “yes” vote on the Frankenstein referendum.