The silliness of the mess the Republicans made when they reconfigured the state Board of Elections after they were inconvenienced by the election of Gov. Roy Cooper in late 2016 will spill over into an election next week for two seats on the Lumberton City Council.

Oh, you didn’t know there was an election? You probably aren’t alone.

We expect even some residents of precincts 3 and 7, who have been without council representation for too long, might be surprised to hear this news — unless they are, and we will pat ourselves on the back, readers of The Robesonian’s print edition or robesonian.com. We had a story just yesterday.

Precinct 7 has been without representation since the sad and unexpected death of Leon Maynor in July. Maynor had served the district ably and with passion since 1995, making him the longest serving member of the council.

Precinct 3 has been without representation since Burnis Wilkins, who was at the start of a second term, resigned in August so he could concentrate on his new assignment of county sheriff.

That is a long time for residents of both districts to be without representation. But the good news is the City Council, although it has some infighting, isn’t dysfunctional, and no members have tried to exploit the absence of a couple of council members by, as a not-so-funny example, making a motion to spend millions of taxpayer dollars on a building with little function that the beneficiaries don’t want.

There isn’t a lot of mystery in the election next week: Eric Chavis will take the Precinct 7 seat and John Carroll the Precinct 3 seat. They are the only candidates to file, and although voters can write in a name, there is no organized write-in campaign similar to the one that John Cantey, the Precinct 5 representative, used to win his seat in 2005.

Although there is no suspense and the outcomes are predetermined, the city by law must hold the election, which will be administered by the county Elections Office, which has no governing board. That is the result of that silliness we spoke about earlier, and a court decision in late December to dissolve the state board that oversees elections, the ripple effect of which also wiped out county elections boards.

The governor is expected to name a new state elections board next week, and presumably it will go about the task of re-establishing local boards, so the certification of elections can resume. But the Lumberton election is the smallest of headaches for the new elections board, which still has to deal with congressional District 9 and a District Court race in Robeson County.

Because the local elections board does not exist, the city election will use five voting sites instead of just two, which will drive up the cost to taxpayers. The local elections board is the only one with authority to allow voters to cast ballots out of their wards, so that is a rather harmless unintended consequence.

Additionally, we have learned that the state will use the city election to test pilot a new system that will be used to identify voters as they arrive to vote. An election without competitive races that promises a modest turnout seems a good place for such a test as there is no chance that a mistake could alter an outcome.

So next week’s election promises to be free of drama. This county could use one of those.