In any other form of job application, it's up the the job seeker to contact the employer and sell themselves. You must know that drill. Unless you are very lucky, employers tend not to contact you unless you are well known in your field or you know the employer personally.
Why is this any different? These people are supposed to be running a police force. They are supposed to be answerable to the people, able to communicate to the population en masse and individually. If they can't do that at the election stage and demonstrate these abilities, then how are they going to do this when they are in place? Why should I add the task of finding out
these people's carefully prepared statements on the Internet to my daily tasks when by all rights they should be coming to me?
This election was doomed to fail before it even started. The needs for PCCs were never fully explained in a convincing matter because the is no convincing reason - and the electorate picked up on this. You only had to see some of the reacts on Question Time to see the volume of feeling on this matter. The candidates were denied the free postal deliveries granted to candidates in other elections, and were incapable of organising their own leaflet drops. Clearly they were expecting something for nothing. The cost of the deposit was in the thousands of pounds region, which may have put off someone truly capable of doing the job properly.
So what we got is no surprise. Those people who voted according to type - that is they didn't know how, why or what, so chose the candidate from the political party that they usually support.
