The magazine of the North Carolina Center for Voter Education • Saturday May 19, 2012

Signs, Signs, Everywhere Signs

By Damon Circosta
Published: Apr. 5, 2010

RALEIGH - Spring is in full swing in North Carolina. Along with the blossoming flowers and newly sprouted leaves comes another ubiquitous seasonal presence: the political yard sign.

During the spring and again in the autumn of even-numbered years, these signs turn up everywhere. There are swarms of them in the medians and clustered on street corners. Drive through any town and you will see them plastered in roadways for maximum visibility. Seems like the only place there aren’t any yard signs is in actual yards.

These signs are distributed by campaigns in an attempt to increase name recognition. The thinking goes that voters are more likely to cast a ballot for a familiar name. Signs are a means of getting the word out about a candidate, but they don’t really tell you much about him. Typically they are just a candidate’s name in a splashy font with bright colors. Just about every campaign buys a healthy amount of signs, but do they work?

The political consulting industry can fall victim to a herd mentality. Rather than fresh and original thinking about how to get a candidate elected, most campaigns copy each other. If one campaign puts a sign up on the side of a road, his opponent will put one right next to it.

Before long every campaign from dog catcher to senator has a sign clustered in the same spot. It would be next to impossible -- and dangerous -- to read them all as you drove by, but this doesn’t stop the unending escalation of the signs. In fact, some of the most unpleasant discussions between rival candidates revolve around signs. Accusations of sign stealing or illegal placement can get more heated than a policy debate.

We know signs don’t persuade and they are nothing more than litter come the day after Election Day. So what can we do to phase them out of our political discourse?

As a rule of thumb, I trust yard signs only when they are in someone’s yard. I try my best to ignore them unless they are in a front lawn. Anyone can get a zealous volunteer to drive around town with a rubber mallet hammering signs into the ground. This, despite the fact that in many locales it is against the law to place signs on public property.

If you really want to gauge the popular support of a candidate, see how many of his or her neighbors are willing to put up a sign in their own yard. A sign in a yard is a vote of confidence.

But more importantly, we need to let the candidates know that we will not be persuaded by name alone.

The reason candidates try so hard to get their name out is they know that some proportion of us will not have done our homework. We will show up to the ballot box unprepared to vote on all of the races. The hope behind the signs is that in the moment when we are trying to recall who to vote for, we will subconsciously recall a name we saw on a sign somewhere.

If we really want candidates to quit plastering signs everywhere, we will take the time to inform ourselves on the platforms and aspirations of each contender.

The beauty of this North Carolina spring is already cluttered with political signs. But if we prove to these candidates that the path to our vote is through an informative campaign, not a mindless game of name identification, the cold war of signs will end.

Then we can enjoy the political season without all the clutter.