The four sheriff candidates, five board of education candidates and the district attorney of this judicial circuit all have refused even to answer The Citizen’s tough questions for our online political forum.

DA Ballard says, “I don’t blog.”

The sheriff candidates — whom we once thought were strong men ready for a demanding job answerable to the public — banded together to say, “We believe that participating in a forum of this type will ... be unproductive ... and would consume an enormous amount of time which we feel would be better spent on more constructive business.”

The five board of education candidates — including two incumbents — were offended by our tough, pointed questions. “We are running a positive campaign and believe these questions are negative in nature. The challengers will not disrespect the current members of the board.” Write softer questions and we might condescend to answer, they in effect said.

Well, somebody has gotten disrespected in this mess of mass political cowardice — the 43,000 readers of this newspaper (a minimum estimate, since that’s how many homes we deliver to each week) and the nearly 53,000 people who visit our website.

By rejecting the tough questions, these candidates have demonstrated an arrogant disregard for the thousands of voters and taxpayers in this community who will never go to a sparsely attended, antiseptic “meet and greet,” so-called forum with its carefully screened, milquetoast “questions” and who depend on this news source to acquaint them with the character of the candidates and the issues they must face.

Ballard, Babb, Hannah, Mindar, Simmons, Smith, Smola, Jensen-Linton, Houston and Aasen have ducked maybe the only hard questions they will be getting this political season.

They are all running as Republicans.

What a sorry scenario.

Whatever else they may have done or accomplished previously, they now seem ... small.

We draw voters’ and taxpayers’ attention to the candidates who did not duck the tough questions. Their responses and the “negative” questions are reprinted in this issue as well as online.

We invite you to consider their political courage and their sense of responsibility to the voters and taxpayers.

Read the questions. See if the questions asked some important things you want and deserve to know.

See who answered. And then vote.