The process of selecting candidates to fill vacancies in the Utah State Board of Education has too many secrets.

But nobody knows how each panel member actually voted. That information is not made public.

It's important information because from the list, the governor picks two candidates to appear on the ballot in each school board district. Voters should be able to examine the process by which the nominations were made.

This year, 37 people have filed for seven open seats. This includes five candidates for District 12, which mostly falls in northern Utah County, and seven candidates for District 13 in Provo. The nominating committee exercises considerable power. In District 13, for example, the panel will eliminate four hopefuls right off the bat, and two in District 12.

Questions have been raised about whether the process is fair or too laden with politics. The committee interviews all candidates in closed sessions and, because the final vote tallies are not disclosed, the partisans emerge with their predictable suspicions.

Some observers feel that the whole selection and interview process should be open to the public; after all, some of the candidates will become elected officials. But a formal regimen of hearings and public interrogations may be overkill at this early stage of the process. It's tough enough to find good candidates, and the prospect of running a public gauntlet could discourage people who might otherwise want to serve.

Here's an analogy: The president of the United States engages administration staff to identify candidates for the Supreme Court. The staff is charged with winnowing the field to two or three candidates. That part of the selection process is not public, nor should it be. Only after the president makes a choice does the chosen candidate go to public confirmation hearings in the Senate.

Like their federal staff counterparts, the Utah nominating committee is dealing with a large number of individuals. Their job is to winnow down the field, not to make a final selection.

It's fair to say that the committee's job is not as weighty as the final selection for the ballot, which is made by the governor. It is certainly not as weighty as an election by the voters.

Still, some say that the process can be unfair; there's politics involved. This is unquestionably true. It's pretty tough to eliminate the views of people from what is fundamentally a human process.

But unfairness is minimized through the composition of the panel itself. Of the 12 members selected by the governor, six are supposed to represent segments of business and industry, such as manufacturing and agriculture. The other six are supposed to represent education sectors, such as teachers and local school boards.

That's a reasonable spread of interests.

Forcing the recruiting and nominating process to be open to the public from start to finish might do more harm than good in another way. Committee members might be reluctant to speak their minds freely if they're on camera and tape, for example, which would only deprive their colleagues of valuable insights.

Yet we strongly object to the nondisclosure of the committee's vote tally. In the past, we're told, panel members have written their choices down on a paper ballot, tallied the results and announced the winning candidates. Who voted for whom has never been made public.

There is absolutely no reason that this information should not be shared. It's a minimal standard of openness that should be adopted immediately.

Secrecy is always a formula for public suspicion, and the antidote is transparency. One of the basic assumptions of representative democracy is that the public can find out how the members of a government body vote. Politicians can talk all they want, but an actual vote shows what they really stand for.

Revealing the vote tally in the state school board nominating process is especially important in light of history. For years, members of the state board were elected in direct, nonpartisan elections. Beginning in 1994, the process moved to committees in each district, then later to the statewide committee that's now in use.

All the changes, for whatever reasons they were adopted, made the process more distant from voters. Today's system may be more efficient, but it's not necessarily better. It is often true, where the public schools are concerned, that the more local input is sought, the better the outcome.

The good news is that the nominating committee's rules are not set in stone. They can be changed. A simple move to release the vote tally to the public would help to alleviate partisan sniping.