In a crowded field, political candidates stand out on street corners — and practically in your yard — with catchy campaign signs.

And in a city where people get a little hot under the collar when someone steals a campaign sign from a given spot, it’s not always simply theft. Rather, it could be somebody playing silly mind games.

Candidates running for office put up signs all around town — some of the signs survive through the June 7 primary and up until election day in November; some get blown away by the elements; and some are likely knocked down by people with nothing better to do.

Strangely, most candidates running for office this time around chose not to put up signs throughout downtown Gallup.

“We [the city] do enforce the placement if it blocks a safety view of an intersection,” City Attorney George Kozeliski said in a phone interview. “But that’s it. I would assume that the reason they aren’t put on public property is that there aren’t too many vacant lots downtown to put one on.”

Some campaign signs still dot blocks around the city and county, and even though Gallup has its own logo, not too many of this season’s campaign signs carried it.

One rather catchy sign was displayed by McKinley County Commission District 3 candidate Johnny Greene, Jr. Greene is a retired fire chief who enjoyed a two-decade city career. He is also a skilled graphic artist who owns his own design shop in Gallup. Greene’s campaign signs bore the color, well, green — an apparent attempt to capture interest and votes. Sadly, the color scheme didn’t work out too well for Greene, who lost the District 3 contest to Bill Lee.

Felisha Adams, who ran as a candidate for the District 4 New Mexico Senate, recently reported that one of her campaign signs was “missing.”

“I went to check on it and it wasn’t there,” Adams said in a phone interview last week. “Who knows where it could have gone?”

No doubt, area candidates in a crowded field for political seats — from county commission to district attorney to state legislative seats — want to stand out, and signs are a way of doing just that. Yet no one had a sign this time with the Gallup logo on it!

Are we waiting till the Nov. 8 general election for someone to come out of the blue and hit us with a really, really colorful sign?

While there are good sign designs and bad ones, in the long run, signs are signs, and their main goal is visibility and to display what office a candidate is seeking.

District 5 House of Representative candidate Kevin Mitchell lost his District 5 House of Representatives seat. His signs were printed in maroon and yellow, which are the school colors of Tohatchi High, where Mitchell attended high school.

Incumbent District 4 Senate winner George Muñoz topped the sign-appeal category when he had a Muñoz advertisement wrapped around bottles of water that were served at a political forum prior to the June 7 primary. When is the last time anybody’s seen something like that?

The bottom line is, both the quantity and the quality of campaign signs influence votes.

By Bernie Dotson