If you listen to the special interest groups and good-government coalitions, Charlie Crist doesn't want you to know where he stands on the issues. But Ronda Storms does.

It's a question of questionnaires.

Every political season, dozens of the written queries roll into campaign headquarters throughout Florida. Do you support abortion? Yes or No? Would you raise taxes a little? A lot? Not at all?

Crist, the Republican frontrunner for governor, sent back position statements instead of answering the specific questions posed to him by the bipartisan interests group Aging with Dignity, among other groups seeking his answers on questionnaires.

"I'm running on my agenda," Crist told the St. Petersburg Times. "… I don't like to be pigeonholed into what the box may say. It's more honest and it's better for the voters to have the information that's in my heart and in my head."

In this day and age of 15-second political TV commercials and direct mail brochures that tell you little beyond how well the candidates dress, you would think I would be raising the banner for more participation in political questionnaires.

Not quite.

Look, I support more political information, so it's hard for me to say that candidates should just blow these things off. But the issue isn't cut-and-dried.

When I was a political consultant, I initially told all my clients to go ahead and fill out questionnaires, even those from online political websites that attempt to categorize all of the nation's candidates. But after having several clients clubbed like baby seals by opponents who distorted their answers on the questionnaires, I changed my mind.

Then there is the sheer magnitude of them. More than a dozen a day crossed my desk at times when I was managing a statewide Senate campaign. Special interest groups. Newspaper editorial boards. Most were more exhaustive than an FBI background check. Many were biased in their questioning or were overly simplistic.

The glut of these questionnaires is astounding, and no serious campaign could ever think about answering them all. Worse, most questionnaires are filled out not by the candidate but by a campaign staffer, in concert with a political director or pollster who tries to turn their candidate's stances into fill-in-the-box questionnaire answers.

On the heels of the Crist story, Project Vote Smart weighed in with outrage that 79 percent of the candidates in Florida refused to answer its National Political Awareness Test (NPAT).

"If candidates are so afraid of letting their opponents know where they stand on key issues, how can they possibly let the voters know how they will handle the job if they are hired?" Project Vote Smart's president, Richard Kimball, said in a news release. "Candidates have lost sight of who their prospective employers are. One campaign consultant told me, 'It's not our job to educate — it's our job to win.'"

Statewide, only two Republicans running for Congress responded to Vote Smart. Eleven Democrats seeking seats in Congress filled out the NPAT. (Long-shot Samm Simpson was the only Democratic congressional candidate in Tampa Bay to do so.) Neither Crist nor Jim Davis completed an NPAT questionnaire. In legislative races, 6.5 percent of Republicans responded; 27 percent of Democrats.

Among those answering the call was Storms. You can say a lot of things about Storms during her tenure on the Hillsborough County Commission, but failing to speak her mind is not one of them.

Other Tampa Bay legislative candidates who responded to the NPAT include Green Party House 57 candidate Brian Becker; Republican incumbent Ed Homan; his challenger, Karen Perez; Republican House 59 candidate Willis "K.C." Bowick and two Democratic House candidates, Donovan R. Brown and Jeremy Zalanes. (You can find their answers at www.vote-smart.org.)

The NPAT is widely ignored by candidates because the answers are often used as "gotchas" for opposition research or to misrepresent a candidate's nuanced or complex beliefs. (I plead guilty here myself.)

I know voters want a simple yes or no answer; unfortunately, almost all of Florida's problems with growth management, economy and education don't call for black-and-white solutions.

How about this instead: more debates, more forums, more media coverage, free newspaper ads and more free time on TV for the candidates.

This article appears in Oct 25-31, 2006.