Your indispensable guide to voting

Welcome to Your Week in Knoxville, emailed every Sunday only to subscribers, from Knox News editor Joel Christopher. A selection of our best pieces from this past week are featured at the bottom of this newsletter.

In all the noise around national politics, it's easy to forget there's an election Aug. 1 and that it's a really important one.

At the local level - the most important one for many of the biggest issues that affect your day-to-day life - many of you will have the chance to select the people to represent you on the Knox County Schools board and the county commission.

At the state and federal level, you'll have the chance to narrow the field for the November general election. These primary elections are where we decide the quality of the candidates, and too often voters have ignored these elections, thinking they're low stakes and inconsequential.

That's a mistake, and ignoring primary elections puts more power in the hands of the extremes of the political spectrum. If you lament that it's impossible to find moderate candidates, that's because there is no incentive for moderation in low turnout primaries.

We get what we demand, and if we're not voting in primaries, we're giving up one of the most important ways of generating strong candidates.

We published in print today a 16-page Voter's Guide designed to help you sort through the dozens of candidates on the ballot on Aug. 1, and the guide will go live online on Wednesday.

We're grateful to the candidates who took the time to meet with us and to fill out an online questionnaire, and hope you'll take advantage of this resource before you vote.

If you have ideas for other elements you'd like to see in a voter's guide, please email me with your suggestions.

Thank you again for your steadfast support of strong local journalism!

Joel Christopher , executive editor, joel.christopher@knoxnews.com

This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: Your indispensable guide to voting