Last year it was the entire slate of nominees for the Pulitzer Prize in investigative reporting. I served on that jury and we nominated three finalists: two projects from The Seattle Times (my principal competitor fer-cryin’-out-loud) and one from The Hartford (Conn.) Courant.

One Times project was an investigation of sex abuse by health care professionals. The other exposed the improper sealing of hundreds of lawsuits. The Courant’s project was a series of reports on suicide among American soldiers who served in Iraq.

The board, in its wisdom and exercising its prerogative, ignored our choices. Those are the rules, and I’m OK with that. The board gave the award to a reporter from The Birmingham (Ala.) News for his investigation of cronyism and corruption in the state’s two-year college system. His work was entered in another category.

This year I served on the jury that evaluated entries in editorial writing. We selected three finalists:

 • The Wisconsin State Journal, for a campaign against abuses of the governor’s veto power.

 • Rodger Jones of The Dallas Morning News for his editorials that led to requiring roll-call votes on all statewide legislation in Texas.

 • Maureen Downey of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution for editorials she wrote about the harsh sentences that teenagers can receive for consensual sex in Georgia.

This year the board awarded no Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

One might naturally speculate that the board thought there was no nominee worthy of a Pulitzer.

I’m just one juror on our panel, but I feel safe in saying that all of us felt any of these three qualified for a Pulitzer. I don’t think worthiness was the problem. My guess is we offered three quite different nominees and, though each gathered supporters, none was able to get a majority of the 17 board votes cast – the necessary qualification for a prize to be awarded.

We had an interesting group of nominees.

Madison’s entry was quirky and compelling. The paper’s editorial board fought and got rid of what folks in the Badger State called “Frankenstein” vetoes.

Before the reform, the state constitution allowed the governor to rewrite budget bills passed by the Legislature, selecting only the words and numerals he liked and vetoing the rest. This allowed the governor to put unrelated words together – stitched from disparate parts, like Frankenstein – to create laws spending money the Legislature never approved.

In one case the governor took an 800-word spending bill and kept only 33 words, but gave a program he favored hundreds of millions more than the Legislature approved.

The paper wrote more than 70 editorials on the topic last year, many accompanied by an image of Frankenstein drawn by their local cartoonist. The number of stitches, and consequently the height of the monster’s forehead, grew with each day that passed without a hearing on the reform measure.

The editorials won a hearing, and the people got to vote. This year they killed the Frankenstein veto monster.

The Dallas Morning News project was a classic good-government campaign. The Texas Legislature allowed virtually any measure to pass with just a voice vote, meaning citizens couldn’t know or hold their representatives accountable for how they voted.

On a foundation of solid research and years-long persistence, the News finally pushed the Legislature to put the matter to a vote of the people. Nearly 85 percent approved it in a November referendum.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution project examined the apparent inequities in Georgia laws that punished people for involvement in consensual sex. The subjects weren’t all model citizens and didn’t easily evoke sympathy, but that made Downey’s work arguably more important: What would America be if we required the law to be fair only to a likable few?

Her work helped free a man from prison and changed Georgia law.

Each nominee’s work was distinguished by clear focus, deep research, persuasive writing and originality. In every case, the nominees helped change laws that made their worlds a little better.

Here’s the standard set for this Pulitzer Prize: For distinguished editorial writing, the test of excellence being clearness of style, moral purpose, sound reasoning and power to influence public opinion in what the writer conceives to be the right direction, in print or in print and online.

All these candidates were worthy. One surely deserved a prize.

Dave Zeeck: 253-597-8434

david.zeeck@thenewstribune.com

blogs.thenewstribune.com/editors