For anyone who wants or needs evidence of why elections matter, we offer up a couple of close-tohome examples.

The first is Maine Gov. Paul LePage, a Republican who is under pressure to resign after he left a threatening, obscenity-laced voice message for a legislator in which the governor suggested he and the lawmaker engage in a good, oldfashioned duel.

LePage has twice been elected by the voters of Maine, who seem to favor his take-no-prisoners style of speaking, even if he does put his L.L. Beans in his mouth on a fairly regular basis.

But his latest actions have caused many Mainers – including some within LePage’s own party – to question his sanity and sobriety and talk about impeaching the state’s chief executive.

The state’s largest newspaper, the Portland Press Herald, even went so far as to apologize to the rest of the country for inflicting LePage on the nation.

Say what you want about any of our recent governors, but we Granite Staters can all share an “at least our governor isn’t Paul LePage” moment. Former Gov. Craig Benson stands as the most controversial head of state in recent New Hampshire history, and he became only the second governor in 78 years to be denied a second term by voters. But as contentious as his tenure was, Benson was never an embarrassment to the state and, in fact, was almost reelected.

The second example of why elections matter can be found right here in our own backyard, where state Rep. Bill O’Brien, R-Mont Vernon, will not be seeking re-election.

O’Brien, it can be argued, did as much damage to the fabric of the state as any House speaker or governor in recent memory. While he deserves credit for the role he played in righting the state’s financial ship in the wake of the financial catastrophe that followed the 2008 election, some segments of state government – especially state aid to higher education – still have not recovered from the deep budget cuts that O’Brien and his crew enacted in the legislative session of 2011. As much as what he did, though, it was the pettiness and intole rance with which O’Brien conducted the business of the House that seemed so at odds with the way we do things in this state: He banned a Concord Monitor reporter from his press conferences because he disliked the paper’s coverage and retaliated against members who pushed ideas not to his liking or didn’t vote the way he thought they should, among other things.

That, more than his ideology, was why Democrats joined with a minority of House Republicans in the last session of the Legislature to back Rep. Shawn Jasper’s bid for speaker over O’Brien. Nobody wanted to go through that again.

Yes, elections matter, and we need only look one state to our east for evidence of that. A candidate’s position on the issues matters, certainly, but blind obedience to political dogma that ignores things like stability and character does the public no favors, despite the garbage that the major political parties and their handmaidens so often peddle.