Now that the city elections are over, I thought it might be a good time to review how we did handling election-related letters to the editor over the last two months.

Trying to keep current with letters is always a challenge, but at no time is it more difficult than during election time – be it local, state or federal – when both time and space are at a premium.

There are always people who want to get in their two cents’ worth prior to Election Day, so it wasn’t particularly surprising that I received a few phone calls and e-mails from people inquiring about why their letters never got published.

Fair enough.

That prompted me to do two things:

• Take a look in the active letters file to determine how many other letters fell into this category. 
• Go back to a particular point in time – I ultimately chose Sept. 1, the day I took on this assignment as editorial page editor – and see how many election letters we published in all.

As best as I can figure, there were 14 letters that didn’t get published, including three that came in either late Friday afternoon or Saturday morning – too late to be published in the Sunday paper. (As is traditionally the case, we didn’t publish any election-related letters on Monday or the day of the election.)

Of those remaining 11 letters, three came in much too long for publication – somewhere in the vicinity of 1,000 words, which is about triple the recommended length. There was one more letter for which we never received a return confirmation call, which brings the number down to a more reasonable seven.

And for those of you who are just naturally curious or prone to conspiracy theories, here’s a breakdown of those 14 letters that did not run:

Favorable to Donnalee Lozeau or anti-Jim Tollner: 4.

Favorable to Tollner: 3.

Pro-board of education candidate Bernie del Llano: 2 (those were among the late ones).

Anti-Ward 6 Alderman Robert Dion: 1.

Anti-Ward 7 Alderman Richard Flynn: 1.

Anti-Ward 9 Alderman Gregory Williams: 1.

Two of the unpublished letters were more generic and didn’t list any candidates by name.

One of the reasons we ran out of time and weren’t able to publish these letters is that, as you may recall, we invited all the non-mayoral candidates for office to submit one letter for publication prior to the deadline of Oct. 12.

The purpose was to give them an opportunity to introduce themselves to voters, explain why they had decided to run and to outline some of their key positions.

Looking back, it appears we published 23 of those letters from candidates for the board of aldermen, board of education, fire commission and board of public works.

As a result, given that most of those letters were published in October, that didn’t leave a lot of time – and room – for letters from voters, most of which were published between Oct. 27 and Nov. 4.

The final tally?

Between Sept. 1 and Election Day, we published 198 letters of all types, not counting those related to the New Hampshire primary. Of those, 76 had to do with the city elections (38 percent). In the final week alone leading up to the election, we published 24 letters – all of those from readers and (it’s hoped) voters.

Maybe it’s me, but 76 letters seems like a reasonable number, particularly since the vast majority of them were published over a four-week period. I’m sure many of our non-city readers feel that way.

Now that it’s over, however, I would be particularly interested in your thoughts on our decision to invite the candidates to write letters to the editor. Good idea or bad idea?

Here’s how I look at it:

On the plus side, it gave some of the newer or first-time candidates an opportunity to introduce themselves to voters, which seemed beneficial for both parties. On the minus side, it took some significant space away from reader-generated letters and resulted in some never making it into the paper.

What do you think?

Nick Pappas is editorial page editor at The Telegraph. He can be reached at 594-6505 or npappas@nashuatelegraph.com.