A Case for Adopting the HHP Model for National and Local Elections

It’s possible that some of you are looking forward to the “election season” break from TV ads featuring Mike Hostilo answering his shower phone or O.C. Welsh’s Jack Russell Terrier trying to escape the camera. I’m willing to bet, however, that your enthusiasm for something new and exciting — political ads —won’t survive to November because Georgia, as a “swing” state, will soon be blitzed by competing advertisements for Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. And we in HHP are in Georgia’s media market. Soon we’ll all know absolutely every saintly attribute and diabolical secret about each candidate from flashy ads repeated ad infinitum on every available media resource. And, we’ll have to make a decision.

But what if the nation-at-large would adopt the HHP annual election of Board members as a model for national elections? I mean why should we be saddled with the responsibility of evaluating candidates for President, Senator, House Representatives or even Hilton Head Town Council for that matter? Think of how much easier it would be to have someone else do all the thinking for us.

First, our candidates would be selected by a group of former office-holders to be certain wild new ideas are properly discouraged. Here in HHP, as we explained once before, candidates are selected from a unknown number of applicants by a nominating committee constructed of former HHP Board Presidents. On a national level we could also save ourselves time and effort by having political leaders of the past select candidates for the future — no more primaries. Why shouldn’t Jimmy Carter and Dick Cheney have prominent roles in charting America’s future in the age of artificial intelligence?

Second, forget campaigning. All we need here in HHP is a photo and a 250 word bio to make our decisions about which pre-selected candidates we’ll favor for expiring Board positions. We get that information in February, are graciously given an opportunity to hear a three- minute presentation by each candidate (no questions, just listen!!) and we vote in March. Bang, all done. We know mostly nothing about them at the start and never have to be bothered about anything else our candidates think or do on our behalf since meetings are secret and meeting minutes are, shall we say, not heavily weighted down by detail. Nationally, the pre- selected candidates could make a televised three-minute talk at the first game of the new NFL season during, for example, a video replay to review a referee’s call. After the election in November, news organizations should understand that transparency in our government is unnecessary and overly burdensome to those elected officials who had already been pre-selected for our convenience. How much simpler would that be?

Third, to the limited extent HHP Board candidates can be evaluated, only one person in the household need “do the work.” That’s because of a quirk we wrote about previously by which a residential unit’s two votes promised by the Amended Declarations are actually only one vote counted twice. This also makes perfect sense in other forms of government, reducing the demand on polling places by at least half. There’s really no excuse for other residents of a household holding different opinions about candidates anyway.

Finally, it seems especially effective here in HHP to hire an unelected third party individual to shield the elected group from having to interact with voters in any meaningful way, and to do the nasty work of making decisions for the community. It’s unclear to us how this approach would be implemented in other government organizational charts, but our lack of imagination is probably because we’re accustomed to having way too much information about national, state and local elected officials. Once these governmental entities adopt the secret HHP candidate selection, abbreviated campaign, and secret meeting processes, having a single, unelected point of contact to and from the elected officials will feel normal. It seems to work fine here in HHP. Why, after all, should we need to be more invested in our national, state and local governments?

It is inevitable, of course, that some citizens will wish to have more input to their representatives or to complain about some unanticipated action after-the-fact. The HHP system has an answer — ignore, obfuscate, exaggerate, deny, slant and misrepresent. What could go so wrong that a survey wouldn’t fix?

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