Last week, as the General Assembly rushed to get bills passed before the clock ran out, the three representatives from Hall County voted “no” on a bill that had little to do with Hall or the rest of the state.The bill was a piece of local legislation from Floyd County’s delegation.Essentially, the question was whether to change Floyd’s elections for probate court judge and for the county’s chief magistrate to nonpartisan elections.That means candidates for those seats don’t put an “R” or a “D” next to their names on the ballot.The bill passed, as most local legislation does, almost without discussion. It has not yet been signed by the governor.Judicial elections are nonpartisan in Hall County, too.But Reps. Carl Rogers, Doug Collins and Emory Dunahoo all voted against it as a political statement on partisanship.Obviously, they think it’s an important part of evaluating a candidate.Collins questioned why lawmakers should change the elections process after having it one way for so long.Rogers repeatedly has said he doesn’t like the idea of nonpartisan elections.Late last year, one of the first bills to be filed for the state’s legislative session from Rep. Allen Peake, R-Macon, sought to give all local governing bodies the option of nonpartisan elections.The bill never made it anywhere.But Peake’s argument when he filed it was that partisan politics has a place on a statewide and a national level but not on the local level.State law, as is, does not allow for nonpartisan elections for countywide offices.The only seven counties in Georgia with nonpartisan elections are consolidated governments in which the county and the city are one government entity.“When it comes to county commissioners, a pothole is a pothole whether you’re Republican or Democrat,” he told me back in December.Rogers told me then that he thinks partisan elections bring out more challengers than nonpartisan elections, which he said seems to protect the incumbent.About the moneyNow that the session’s over, the money raising can begin.