When voters head to the polls to elect town leaders in Webster this fall, the choices will be slim. Mighty slim.

Only two candidates are running for five openings on the board — leaving three seats unclaimed.

The tiny Jackson County town has just 444 registered voters. The sign-up period for candidates to run in town elections was held in July, but the two-week window came and went without enough takers putting their name in the hat. Jackson County Election Director Lisa Lovedahl-Lehman extended the filing period by five days, which is the maximum allowed under state law. But no additional candidates emerged.

So come Election Day, the makeup of the town board will largely be determined by write-ins.

“We’ve never had this happen before,” Lovedahl said. “This is the first widespread write-in candidacy.”

Billy Jean Bryson, a Webster town board member who defied the trend and will run for re-election, said she doesn’t know why three of her fellow board members are stepping down.

“I asked them the same question myself,” Bryson said. “I guess they just decided they didn’t want to.”

The long-time mayor of Webster, Steve Gray, is stepping down this year as well, but someone has stepped up to run for mayor at least.

The line-up — or rather lack of one — has prompted Bryson to go on the stump to recruit prospective candidates rather than leaving it up to chance that a write-in will emerge.

“I have several neighbors who would certainly do an excellent job,” Bryson said. “I will have to consult with them.”

Bryson knows of two people whom she believes have agreed to serve on the board. Next it will be a matter of disseminating the word to voters what name to write in. Bryson said if push comes to shove, the town board could function with just four members and a permanently vacant seat. They would still have the necessary majority for a quorum and the mayor could vote in the case of a tie.

“We could work with that if we had to,” Bryson said.

Being a small town doesn’t usually preclude competition in local elections. In fact, the opposite can be true. Four years ago, there was healthy competition in the Webster election with two contestants for mayor and eight people running for the five town board seats.

Jackson County poll workers will contend with write-in ballots from at least two towns on election night this fall. One is Webster, where not enough people have stepped forward to run, leaving the town’s fate up to write-in candidates. The other is in neighboring Forest Hills, where the mayor missed the deadline to file for election and will now wage a write-in campaign.

Forest Hills Mayor James Wallace was hiking in the Swiss Alps in July when the sign-up period for candidates came and went, unbeknownst to him. When Wallace got back in town, he went by the election office only to discover he had missed the filing period and it was too late to get his name on the ballot. He now says he will run as a write-in candidate.

In the meantime, another candidate, Mark Teague, filed to run for mayor at the last minute. Teague was initially planning to run for a regular seat on the Forest Hills town board. He appeared in the Jackson County election office minutes before the filing deadline only to learn no one had signed up to run for mayor yet. So Teague filed to run for mayor instead.

Wallace said he always intended to run and had even told the rest of the town board that he would.

While Teague initially thought he was running unopposed, he said it doesn’t bother him that Wallace will be running after all as a write-in.

“Whatever turns up, turns up,” Teague said. “I was just looking to help out the neighborhood.”

Teague, 45, owns a company called Environmental, Inc., which provides wastewater treatment services. Wallace is a retired Western Carolina University professor.

Forest Hills is a tiny town of less than 350 registered voters. It was incorporated as recently as 1997 with the sole purpose of creating land-use protections that would keep out student apartments, trailer parks and undesirable commercial enterprises.

Forest Hills lacks a town hall. Records were historically kept at the mayor’s home, with the boxes shuffled off between neighbors when a new mayor got elected, along with a special fireproof box for the most important documents. When Wallace became mayor, he didn’t want to become custodian of all those boxes, however. When none of the town board members were willing to take in the boxes either, Wallace suggested renting a storage unit. Instead, the town board chose to have the records digitized with discs placed in a safe deposit box.

People in Cherokee will no longer have to drive or hitch rides into Bryson City to cast ballots during early voting.

The Swain County Board of Elections recently agreed to establish an early voting site in Cherokee, a move that will likely increase voter participation.

A 92-year-old woman from the Big Cove community in Cherokee came to the board of elections and asked it to set up an early voting site on tribal land. Otherwise, Cherokee voters had to travel as many as 40 miles roundtrip to cast their ballots in Bryson City.

“It was placing undue hardship on the voter,” said John Herrin, a member of the Swain Board of Elections.

When it comes to elections for tribal offices like chief, Cherokee runs its own elections. But for state and national elections, Cherokee voters cast ballots under the auspice of either Swain or Jackson counties, depending on which side of the reservation they live on. Jackson already had a polling site set up for Cherokee voters.

“Jackson County residents basically could go a couple miles from their home, while Swain County residents had a 20-mile drive,” Herrin said.

A site for the new polling location has yet to be chosen. The site will only be open during early voting. On Election Day, Cherokee voters will still have to leave the reservation to vote in the Whittier precinct.

Herrin hopes the establishment of an early voting site on the reservation will encourage better voter turnout.

Cherokee voters already showed good turnout in the last election, with 70 percent casting a ballot, according to Board of Elections Director Joan Weeks. But while 25 percent of all registered Swain County voters cast early ballots, only 17 percent of Cherokee did so — a discrepancy likely linked to the distance of the nearest early voting site.

The early voting polling site might also increase participation in local off-year elections, such as county commissioner races, which Cherokee voters previously haven’t turned out for in high numbers.

“Typically, you see a lot of participation from the Reservation on presidential and senatorial elections, and not nearly as much during off years for local county government,” said Herrin. “We might see a lot more, considering they don’t have to be inconvenienced as much as in the past. We can’t just go out there and beat on their doors and beg them, but we can definitely make it as easy as possible to vote,” Herrin said.

The most fascinating race for President of the United States in my lifetime could have become a good bit more settled after the Super Tuesday round of primaries. Hillary Clinton, the “establishment” candidate and heavy favorite going into the primary season, might have delivered the knockout blow to upstart Barack Obama. Instead, she managed only to hold serve in the biggest states that she absolutely had to have — New York, New Jersey, and California — and emerge on Wednesday with the very slightest of leads in delegates. It was enough for the Clinton campaign to declare the night a success, which it had to do as a show of confidence.

Voters in Jackson County could have a rematch in the May primary between two candidates who ran against each other for county commissioner two years ago — Joe Cowan and Darrell Fox for the district that includes Webster and Cullowhee.

When Jackson County commissioners passed strict mountainside development regulations last year, opponents pledged to get even come election time.

PUNXSUTAWNEY, Penn. — A year from the day he announced his candidacy for the Republican nomination for president, Punxsutawney Phil, the most famous groundhog in the land, has dropped out of the race for the highest office in the land.

“Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

— Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson believed in a strict code of ethics and morality that was Christian-like, and judged according to that belief. When I came across this quote the other day while reading the Washington Post online, it seemed relevant to our situation today.

By David Curtis

College football and presidential primary politics make strange bedfellows, but in this New Year I think they have been sharing the same sheets.

By Tom Jensen • Guest Columnist

John Edwards and Mike Huckabee are the most popular Presidential candidates in their own parties in Western North Carolina, according to recent surveys conducted by Raleigh’s Public Policy Polling. But Rudy Giuliani is the most popular candidate with the public at large in WNC.