The 2014 General Election is over.

As registered voters, we cast our ballots and we watched election results pour in on Tuesday evening.

The apparent winners were announced and Kitsap County residents can be proud of the fact that we had a higher voter turnout than the average across Washington state.

For the most part, candidates in races in Kitsap County ran good, clean races. And now, whether your candidate won or lost, all of us need to stand behind the winners and help them be successful by continuing the dialogue and making our opinions known. We need to help them deliver good decisions.

There’s just one other thing left that we need to do — take down campaign signs.

It never ceases to amaze us that so many campaign signs are left up after the election has come and gone. The fact that they even are allowed in Washington state has some perplexed.

Consider the man who moved from Hawaii to the Edmonds area in the mid 1990s. He sought the help of the local newspaper there to ask candidates not to post signs because he considered it littering.

He worked to try to get local legislation passed prohibiting campaign signs on street corners and in people’s front yards. But nothing seemed to work. He was in the minority and the majority felt that campaign signs were a protected form of speech and a First Amendment right.

So, the week before the election, at his own expense, he had great art masterpieces printed on large sheets of paper and spent an entire evening covering as many campaign signs as he could with prints of beautiful flowers, mountain scenes  — even the Mona Lisa.

In the morning, he was pleased, but others were not.

He ended up being charged with trespassing and damaging private property. In some strange way, however, he got his message across.

Following that election, and for many years after, campaign signs in his city went up during election season and came down right after afterward.

There’s a lesson in this story for us. Candidates and their teams need to put away all campaign signs soon and return our neighborhoods to their natural beauty.