Congrats to Mayor Street for defeating Sam Katz.

Related: Read The Pennsylvania Gazette’s endorsement of John Street.

And yes – the voting machines did seem to be complicated this year. You couldn’t simply toggle between two candidates. If you had made a choice and wanted to change it, you had to unselect it, and then select the other candidate. Bad, bad, bad design.

Are you going to vote? Are you going to have your opinion count? Are you going to vote on the issues? Are you going to vote based on fear?

Vote.

If there is to be a road to victory for Katz, it runs through the overwhelming white and blue-collar wards in the Far Northeast, and nine other wards in places such as Mayfair, Frankford and Holmesburg. Katz won more than 75 percent of that vote four years ago. He needs to do that again and better.

For Street, the path to keeping power runs through the 10 wards in North Philadelphia that he carried with more than 90 percent of the vote in 1999, as well as in the eight in West Philadelphia where he won more than 80 percent. All of those wards are overwhelmingly African American.

So there it is: two cities, one largely white and one largely black, separate and equally powerful – but that depends on who turns out Tuesday.

Read the rest in The Philadelphia Inquirer.

Of course, instead of listening to calls of corruption from Katz or calls of victimhood from Street – you could study their stands on the issues . The issues matter. At the local level our representatives have huge responsibilities and can do much for positive or negative change.