You can learn a lot about candidates by the way they fill out the questionnaires we provide them online. Sometimes what you learn is impressive – innovative ideas about addressing community challenges, a particularly interesting job they’ve held, how many languages they speak.

Other times, what you learn is less impressive and more revealing.

For example, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve read “me, myself and I” in answer to our question about a candidate’s top three campaign contributors. This reveals at least two things: Nobody besides the candidate is willing to put his money where his mouth is in terms of backing that candidate, and the candidate thinks he’s witty but isn’t.

This answer often reveals something else: Unless this candidate’s opponent inspires even less confidence, we probably won’t recommend Mr. Me-Myself-and-I for election.

In 10 days, voters across the state will go to the polls and cast ballots in hundreds of local elections. As Assistant Editorial Page Editor Michael Landauer described in his Ask the Editor column last month, the Editorial Board wrote questionnaires in March and e-mailed them to some 160 candidates in contested races in 20 North Texas cities and 13 school districts. The idea is to help voters – and ourselves – make informed decisions in these elections.

Eight-eight percent responded. Go here to find the candidates in your city or school board and compare their answers to key questions.

We did something similar at the start of the year when we wrote and e-mailed questionnaires to more than 170 candidates for state and federal office. Seventy-five percent of them completed the questionnaires. The winners of the March primary will face off in the November general election. Go here to find these questionnaires.

Some candidates take our questionnaires very seriously. Check out state Rep. Brian McCall’s answers, for example. Here’s a guy who has no primary and or major party general election opposition to his re-election bid, yet he took the time to provide clear, thoughtful and concise answers to questions from education to regional transit, air quality to the death penalty.

Even with no opposition, he told us he completed the questionnaire because he thought it was of value to voters and a good exercise for elected officials.

You can deduce from Mr. McCall’s answers – whether you agree with his specific positions - that he is bright, serious-minded and deliberate in his thinking. (If you happen to agree with him, of course, he looks downright brilliant.)

Other candidates take the questionnaires, well, perhaps a bit too seriously.

No candidate matches Democrat Baltasar Cruz for, let’s say, completeness. Mr. Cruz, a Dallas lawyer who lost his bid earlier this month for the Texas Supreme Court, offered a 2,200-word epic that meandered through various aspects of his career and the law. It was revealing in its lack of discipline.

When the candidates came in to interview with us, one of the Editorial Board members asked Mr. Cruz about the value of brevity in written judicial decisions and how well he does in this category.

Mr. Cruz launched into a soliloquy about how brevity is often overrated.

For this and other reasons, we recommended his opponent.

I don’t pretend that reading candidates’ answers to our questions is riveting literature. In some cases, the phone book would be more exciting. But every now and then you come across some gems.

In years past, I’ve read answers from candidates who claimed to have successfully sold tickets to Mars (round trip, of course), who said he was proud to have five children and “thankfully, only one of them a daughter” and who wanted Texas to secede from the union.

Other “revelations” are more subtle.

In the only contested Dallas School Board race this month, for example, Pedro Alvarez is challenging first-termer Adam Medrano. Mr. Alvarez spends a lot of time making the case in his questionnaire that change is needed in the district, and, therefore, the incumbent should be defeated.

Not an unfair point, but if you read on, you realize that the change Mr. Alvarez proposes begins and ends with electing a challenger – himself – who has never attended a single DISD board meeting nor even met the district’s superintendent, Michael Hinojosa.

Which might prompt a careful voter to ask: How much change is that, really? And is it good change or bad change?

If you live in Mesquite, you can tell pretty quickly from both mayoral candidates that each wants to spruce up the city’s image. One, however, is thinking quite literally and wants to get into the nitty-gritty of the Public Works Department.

And one candidates running for Farmers Branch City Council has an interesting idea. He says his city should create council districts instead of electing at-large representatives because this would allow citizens to have “taxation with representation” (though his constituents would probably prefer it the other way around – no taxation without representation).

Sometimes, despite the detail we seek in our questions, you have to look beneath the surface.

One youngish candidate for the Texas House from Collin County listed his occupation as “VP and marketing director” for an insurance-related business. We were impressed. We asked some follow-up questions in the interview session.

Who owns the business? His father.

How many employees? Two.

Hmm. Color us not quite as impressed.

Lest you think we editorialists lead dull and boring lives, chained to our desks reading dull and boring candidate questionnaires and preparing for dull and boring candidate interviews, consider the case of Kennedale lawyer Steve Bush.

Mr. Bush was one of two Democrats running this year for the right to take on veteran U.S. Rep. Joe Barton in November. As our interview team filed into the meeting room, after having reviewed the candidates’ questionnaires, Mr. Bush burst into song, guitar in hand, showcasing the robustly anti-Republican campaign lyrics he’d written.

His opponent, Ludwig Otto, caught short, rose to the occasion. He launched into his own, made-up-on-the-spot campaign song, sung to the tune of “You Are My Sunshine.”

Mr. Otto won the primary.

Which brings us to the most important question: What lyrics will Mr. Barton offer this fall?