Candidate filing week, on now, always sparks some deep conversations at my house. My husband and I speculate on who is going to run for various positions, and why. We speculate on how much one person with an agenda, community minded or self-serving, can really do in the representative forms of government we have. We sarcastically encourage each other to run for office, since we know so much.

Mostly we circle back to people’s reasons for running for office. Why would anyone take on all the work that comes with an election campaign? Beyond that, if the campaign is successful, who can afford the extra time, energy and brain power it takes to go to all those meetings, read all those documents, deal with all those constituents?

I am the only one in my immediate family to not end up working for state or county government, and the only one of my siblings to never be elected to (or run for) any public office. I’ve covered six city councils, four school districts and three county councils over the years and from what I’ve learned, I can say without embarrassment that I am too lazy to run for office.

Not many people come to the local government meetings on an average day, and those who do may watch and think, “that’s not so hard, sitting around a table and voting unanimously on everything.” They’re  seeing the smallest part of the work, though, not the long discussions on issues that have been going on for months or years beforehand. They also aren’t seeing the commissions and committees who hashed over the decisions for weeks and months before that. Or the time put in by the city, school district, hospital district, county and fire district staff members throughout the process.

So by the time we see it, it really doesn’t look that hard. But we haven’t done our homework.

Granted, not all elected officials do their homework, either. Entire websites are dedicated to how many votes state and federal legislators miss (http://washingtonvotes.org), for example, as well as how many outright lies they state as facts in their talking points (www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter).

The ones who do their homework, even if I disagree with them, should stay. They’re the ones who make sure they’re listening to their constituency, not just their friends and neighbors and the three people who send them e-mail messages every day. They read the 600-page comprehensive plans and the statewide education policies. They listen to their staff and to committee recommendations, then they think about their votes before casting them.

I’d like to see those other guys, the ones who are invisible to people until election time, and don’t know enough about issues to talk off script, to have competition on the ballot.  Maybe it’s you. Maybe even, some day, me.