Two people are running for St. Augustine Beach Commission Seat 3, which is the only city commission race in that city anywhere on the Nov. 3 ballot. The Supervisor of Elections lists the field as Jacob Dascomb and Undine Celeste George, each carrying the party designation N/P. George holds the seat now. She is the incumbent.

Early voting opened Wednesday and closes on Saturday, Oct. 31, running at ten sites from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day in between.

So the ballot has been in front of voters in this race for five days. This newspaper had not printed either name.

Why the names were missing, which is this paper’s own doing

On Oct. 21 the Tattler reported the office headings on the general election ballot and named the two candidates in the single School Board race. It named nobody else, and it said why in its own source note: the column alignment in the text layer of that sample ballot drifts between the name, the party and the address fields, so the paper relied only on the headings and on two names that happened to sit on their own lines.

That was the right call for that document. A name read out of a drifting column may belong to the office printed above it.

What it missed was the second document. The Supervisor of Elections also publishes a plain list of general election candidates in English and Spanish, over the name of Vicky Oakes, and the field for this seat sits in it with no ambiguity at all.

This paper had already downloaded that file on the same day as the other one. Nobody opened it. That is the whole explanation.

What this paper can tell a voter about either of them, which is close to nothing

Ms. George has sat on the commission for the whole period this newsroom has been covering it, and the only vote of hers that appears anywhere in this paper’s published archive is a single motion that she seconded.

Mr. Dascomb appears in these records exactly once, which is the candidate list named above. No vote. No public comment. No filed document carrying his name has been read here. That is a statement about the Tattler and not about either candidate.

A challenger who has never held the seat has no voting record to read, and nobody should pretend that is a flaw in the challenger rather than the ordinary condition of running for something. What is a flaw, and it is this paper’s, is that a newsroom covering this county had not put a single question to either of them with nine days left on the clock.

What happens next

The Tattler is sending both candidates the same written questions, and whatever each of them sends back will be printed in full, side by side, before the polls close on Nov. 3. If one answers and the other does not, that gets printed too.

Seat 3 is a four-year term on a five-member commission that sets the beach city’s budget, writes its building rules and decides what its police department is given to spend.

This paper has carried agenda items off that commission all autumn. It had not carried the names of the two people asking to join it.