OSTARA — The most-read document on Solara this month is not a campaign leaflet. It is the winter ferry timetable, posted at the Ostara terminal, which cuts weekday sailings to Westport from three to two. By the second morning, someone had drawn a small circle around the word "reduced."
Five candidates are now qualified for the Ostara district, which sends three members to the Assembly. Ilka Saremi, Anse Dorvallo, Mira Tollan, Joss Brenner and Teo Varrin are on the roll in order of filing. Because the district elects three members by proportional Ranked Choice Voting, a candidate who wins just over a quarter of the vote is certain of a seat, and votes beyond what a winner needs pass to the voters' next choices. Every campaign here has learned to ask for second preferences.
Solara elects nine members of the Assembly. It elects no senators, because Territories hold no Senate seats. That is the background to nearly every conversation here, and the subject candidates are most careful about.
Solara has passed its first Statehood Audit. Under §15.2(4) it remains a Territory until a second successful audit is completed, and that audit must come within two years of the first. Each of the three Monitors examines its own domain and publishes its own finding. If the second audit succeeds, Solara becomes a State by constitutional operation, two Senate seats are created, and the Elections Panel fills them by special election. No election this spring decides it.
"I can't vote Solara into the Senate. Nobody can," said Saremi, who is seeking another term. "What an Assembly member can do is make sure the island is ready to be measured, and that federal programs reach us the same as they reach the mainland."
Dorvallo, who runs a chandlery near the ferry terminal, has spent most of his campaign on the timetable. "Statehood is a word," he said. "Two sailings a day is a fact. I can tell you what the fact costs a fisherman and a pharmacy." Asked whether a winter timetable set by the Territorial Authority was an Assembly matter, he said it was not, and that he would raise it anyway.
Tollan, a schoolteacher, speaks about the island's own language and the schools that teach it, and says Solara's distinct culture should be understood as a strength in any audit, not a complication. Brenner and Varrin have campaigned mostly in the island's outlying villages.
On the mainland, the spring election is often described as a contest for Legat Consul. In Ostara it is a contest for three Assembly seats, held on an island still waiting on a finding no candidate can supply. Several voters said they found that clarifying. One, waiting for the afternoon sailing, said it made the timetable more important, not less.