Gov. Pat McCrory’s signature is all that is needed to give North Carolina residents a greater say in who will be the nation’s next president.

Last week the Republican-led General Assembly approved legislation that would move next year’s primary from early May to March 15, and although McCrory hasn’t shown his hand, there is little reason to believe the bill won’t become law. Legislators contend that giving this state’s residents a presidential primary date in March will mean North Carolina will get more love from candidates and enjoy additional clout; too often the presidential primary races have been determined by the time May rolls around.

The decision will also affect local elections as they too will be moved to the March 15 date to save the cost of a second primary. Some of the details can be found in staff writer Bob Shiles’ page 1A story today, but the most obvious difference will be that the filing period will be moved to Dec. 1 of this year and campaigns will be launched earlier.

We don’t know what — if any — effect the earlier date will have on election outcomes, but we can hope for this: Perhaps the earlier date by about two months will mean that anger toward our Board of Education and its recent debacle in hiring a superintendent will be a wee bit fresher in voters’ minds.

If not, we pledge today to freshen their memories.

This newspaper has a long tradition of not endorsing candidates; we can recall doing that only once, in support of Lumberton native Mike McIntyre and his 2010 bid for re-election to the U.S. House. It’s too early today to say we will abandon that philosophy, primarily because we don’t know who the candidates will be.

We promise that we will not only remind voters of how the Board of Education picked a local person who wasn’t interested in the job over a more-qualified out-of-county person who was eager for it, but we will look hard at other issues, such as why students in the Public Schools of Robeson County are stuck at the wrong end of most acheivement lists when compared with their peers across the state. Today’s The Robesonian, as one of many examples, details how we lag in SAT scores.

We promise the same for the best paid and benefited commissioners in North Carolina, but again, our focus will not be limited to their pilfering of your dollar. The average term on our current board is more than two terms, yet our county continues to be on the wrong end of most lists, the most dire being poverty and crime. When will the time arrive to hold these commissioners accountable for lack of results?

The arrogance of our elected leaders is propped up by their knowledge that they are beholden to Big Money that will pay to have no- and low-information voters hauled to the polls where they will cast ballots as they are instructed. A donut and a cup of coffee buys a lot on Election Day in this county.

It is a formula that has driven us to the bottom.

But we only have to look to the 2014 county commissioner election to know that the public has been stirred. One county commissioner was unseated, and two more, including Chairman Noah Woods, who has been on the board since 1990, won narrow elections.

There remains anger in this county, and we promise to stoke it in the days leading up to the election. But what is needed is educated and well-credential candidates who are backed by grass-roots campaigns that are well-financed. That is a job for you, not this newspaper.

And with a March 15 primary, there isn’t time to waste.