And no, I'm not talking about the Republican presidential primary, for while the dynamics of that race are pretty damn stupid, the election itself at least operates by fairly reasonable and democratic rules. The same, however, cannot be said of the King Conservation District (KCD), a taxpayer funded government entity with a uniquely weird and poorly publicized election system that makes North Korea's look downright transparent.

And it's an election system that's not just stupid, it may in fact be unconstitutional.

Conservation districts are the only elected bodies in the state not to elect their members through normal county-administered elections; there are no voter guides, no campaigns to speak of, and no mail-in ballots. For decades, KCD's elections, held in near secrecy at a handful of polling sites, would literally draw mere dozens of voters out of the approximately 1.1 million registered in King County. In 1989, for example, only 18 voters cast ballots countywide.

With the rise of the Internet, however, word started to get out, culminating in a record turnout of over 4,000 voters—roughly 0.4 percent—in KCD's 2010 election, and a 90-minute wait to vote at the Bellevue library. So last year the KCD abandoned polling places entirely, moving to a dubious online election that actually required printing out pages and faxing them back. Turnout dropped.

While there's little information on the KCD's website, executive director Sara Hemphill tells me that this year's election will be electronic as well, but I caught her as she was rushing to a meeting in Olympia, and she was too out of breath to give me the details. Not that it much matters, as there's only one name on the ballot this year, thanks to an obscure statutory provision that eliminated the other candidate for... wait for it... not owning land. Really.

After consulting with Hemphill, Seattle attorney Chris Maryatt had properly filed for the open KCD board seat, only to be advised late last week that he would not be eligible because one of the two remaining elected board members had since sold his farm. "When this change occurred there were still two landed board members so no adjustments were needed," Hemphill emailed Maryatt. "However, one of those two landowner board members is leaving which makes the open seat one that requires a landowner and I didn’t remember this, despite your careful and diligent question to me."

The filing deadline has since passed. Hence the uncontested election.

I suppose Hemphill can be blamed for inadvertantly giving Maryatt bad advice, but we must blame the statute for the rule:

RCW 89.08.160
If the commission finds the project practicable, it shall appoint two supervisors, one of whom shall be a landowner or operator of a farm, who shall be qualified by training and experience to perform the specialized skilled services required of them. They, with the three elected supervisors, two of whom shall be landowners or operators of a farm, shall constitute the governing board of the district.

That's right, two of three elected members of the KCD board must either be landowners, or operators of a farm. Presumably, in addition to being a landholder, one needn't also be white and male, but either way, is this really constitutional? I'm no lawyer, so perhaps the US Supreme Court has applied the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause differently to eligibility for holding elective offices than it has to eligibility for voting for them, but this landownership provision sure does seem to violate the spirit of the landmark Harper v. Virginia, a decision that barred poll taxes and property requirements, and which cites the following precedent from Reynolds v. Sims:

"A citizen, a qualified voter, is no more nor no less so because he lives in the city or on the farm. This is the clear and strong command of our Constitution's Equal Protection Clause. This is an essential part of the concept of a government of laws, and not men. This is at the heart of Lincoln's vision of 'government of the people, by the people, [and] for the people."

In her very apologetic email to Maryatt, Hemphill argues that this landownership rule exists for a good reason. "The conservation district mission and mandate is focused on engaging private landowners in good stewardship of soil, water, land and wildlife," Hemphill writes. "Much of the board work and focus deals with technical issues and there needs to be that expertise and authority on the board in addition to our staff."

Fair enough, though good intentions don't necessarily substitute for good law. The KCD also justifies its bizarre system of electing board members by the fact that regular annual elections would simply be too expensive given its limited $6.5 million annual budget. Okay.

But if the result is an elective office whose eligibility requirements violate the equal protection clause, and for which 99.6 percent of registered voters will never cast a ballot, why elect these board members at all? The KCD's mission sounds worthy and all, but its elections are just plain stupid.