Put Campaign Signs on a Shorter Leash

Moore County’s election season has become a roadside occupation

#Opinion • 7:00 a.m. March 26, 2026

One hundred forty-nine days.

That is the stretch between Moore County’s March 10 qualifying deadline and the Aug. 6 general election – nearly five months, or long enough for a few campaign signs to turn into a full-blown roadside occupation.

And yet the signs were out even before the deadline.

In Moore County, election season no longer arrives. It squats.

It settles into intersections, fence lines, rights-of-way, and every other patch of dirt sturdy enough to hold a wire frame, a campaign sign, and a healthy misunderstanding of restraint. Before long, the county looks less like home and more like a showroom for political self-promotion.

Let’s be fair: Campaign signs are legal, customary, and part of the ritual. Candidates want name recognition, and supporters want to show enthusiasm. Fair enough. Nobody is asking them to campaign in a whisper.

But there is a difference between campaigning and cluttering up the place.

After weeks, then months, of passing the same signs at the same corners, the effect is not persuasion. It is numbness. And after the election, when too many of those signs are still standing there – sun-faded, rain-bent, and leaning like they have given up on the whole process themselves – the whole thing stops looking like civic participation and starts looking like litter with a slogan on it.

That is why Moore County ought to amend the Charter, or adopt whatever local rule is necessary, to set a simple standard: Campaign signs can go up 60 days before an election, and they must come down within 72 hours after the polls close.

That is not censorship. It is housekeeping.

Sixty days is plenty of time. Two full months is enough to build name recognition, explain what you stand for, and remind voters that an election is coming. If 60 days is not enough time to introduce yourself to Moore County voters, the problem is not the rule. It is the campaign – or possibly the candidate’s definition of campaigning.

And the 72-hour cleanup requirement should not be controversial, either. If you want the public to trust you with office, the least you can do is clean up campaign debris.

That is a pretty low bar.

Let’s also say plainly what many people already think every time they pass another sign planted at a busy intersection: When campaign signs overstay an election, they become a form of litter.

The countryside should not have to keep wearing an election after the voting is done.

That matters in Moore County, where the view still counts for something – the open land, the clean roadsides, the drive into Lynchburg. A county ought to belong first to the people who live in it, not to a months-long contest in who can staple the most names to the landscape.

A shorter sign window would not silence anyone. Candidates would still have forums, media coverage, social media, mailers, door-knocking, handshakes, phone calls, church suppers, ballgames, and all the other old-fashioned ways of reminding people they exist. They would still have every opportunity to earn support the honest way – by showing up, speaking plainly, and giving people a reason to vote for them beyond a name in oversized type.

In fact, shorter sign seasons might improve local campaigns.

Instead of dragging voters through a long preseason of self-promotion, candidates would have to be sharper, more visible, and more intentional when it actually counts. They would have to actually make their case, not just scatter their names across the county like yard flags.

That is the heart of it. Elections are meant to persuade voters, not redecorate the county.

Moore County does not need an endless sign season that starts too early, hangs around too long, and stays standing after the votes are counted. It needs a rule that respects the public, respects the landscape, and respects the idea that civic life should not leave trash behind.

Sixty days before. Seventy-two hours after.

That is not a burden. It is basic respect for the place.