We will endorse for the governor’s race, the U.S. Senate race, the First District House race, the four races for the Minnesota legislative districts that include parts of Blue Earth County, Mankato, North Mankato and St. Peter.

We will also comment on ballot questions including the Mankato and North Mankato sales tax questions.

Our endorsements, as they have been in the last election, highlight the qualifications of both candidates. They are meant to offer voters one view of who they might vote for. We’ll make clear that some candidates we don’t endorse may very well be the best candidates for people whose issue priorities are different from those of The Free Press editorial board.

We will endorse candidates based on their experience in public office and their work experiences as well as their communication skills, their willingness to see other points of view and how well they work in a bipartisan way. We’ll also consider their critical thinking skills and if they would be able to represent all of the people of their district, not just the ones who voted for them.

We will also look to see which candidates have positions on the issues that have been consistent with previous Free Press editorial board positions. For example, The Free Press long has criticized the cuts to local government aid during the 2003 budget crisis at the state level, not necessarily because the program shouldn’t have been cut, but because a Republican-sponsored amendment to the bill that would have spread cuts more fairly over suburban communities was defeated.

So, incumbents who voted against the so called “Dorman amendment” would probably not get many points on The Free Press endorsement review. On the other hand, if a candidate is much more experienced in being a legislator than his opponent, we might consider that to outweigh the issue difference we had with that candidate.

All in all, we hope candidates who we do not endorse don’t take it personally. It isn’t personal. And we hope our readers consider our honest intentions of producing a independent newspaper that goes forward without favoring one side or the other. But we won’t be afraid to give our opinion either.

We feel our readers benefit from the views of the five people on the editorial board who have more than 100 years combined of listening to politicians.

In the end, we hope everyone can come out of the election being a good sport, no matter how their candidate came out.

Online content expands

If you haven’t noticed, all of The Free Press elections stories published in the print edition also appear on The Free Press Web site at www.mankatofreepress.com. Go to the “Election News” menu and you’ll get a list.

If you do an archive search on the Web site using a candidate’s name, your search will pull up all stories where the candidate was mentioned, from newest stories to oldest.

Also, we now have an electronic search function on our Web site to search Congressional votes from 2005 up to the present. We’ve contracted with Roll Call Report, a longtime, credible, nonpartisan news service that follows Washington, D.C., news and tracks voting records.

Just click on the “Roll Call Votes” subhead on the “Election News” menu bar.