Elections are crucial to the health of our democracy but they are not popularity contests.

Sometimes, or often, depending where one lives in the U.S., that is the case and Democracy — and voters — lose when that occurs.

There are a host of candidates running for state and top local posts in the May primary election and surely every one is confident and committed to their views.

Yet voters have a responsibility to look carefully at each candidate and the issues they stand for and then decipher how that candidate can help the community.

Many times a politician — at any level — will have a host of nice-sounding ideas. Their focus on achieving those ideas, of translating them into action, may even sound logical and doable. But those plans, those views, need to be processed by each voter before they receive their ballot in the mail.

Whatever a particular candidate’s personality may be, the items that should matter to voters revolve around how they will get things done to help the community and how they intend to address any number of issues that are important to voters.

Nothing else, in the end, matters. If they carefully lay down a plan then they must explain how it will work and how it will impact taxpayers.

Seemingly hot-button items such as gender or religion or party affiliation should not carry as much weight in a small town as what kind of character a candidate has and how articulate they are when explaining their goals for the future.

We as voters tend to gravitate to people we know. That’s human and perfectly normal. Yet we must always give space for that candidate we may not know much about when contemplating the best choice during an election.

Democracy is too important to be left on cruise control. We don’t have the luxury, whether we believe it or not, to waste time acting like the May primary is a high school student body election.

We must choose wisely and only with the knowledge we’ve spent the time necessary doing research on each candidate.