The news a week ago in the Williamsport Sun-Gazette was that Kamala Harris, vice president and Democratic nominee for the presidency, would skip the Al Smith dinner.

As the article from the Associated Press noted, it has been a tradition for both Democratic and Republican candidates to speak at the dinner for more than 60 years.

More importantly, in this case, it is yet another example of Harris avoiding an event where voters can assess her performance outside of tightly scripted and abundantly orchestrated speeches.

We editorialized in the Aug. 12 edition that Harris owes it to voters to submit herself to greater levels of scrutiny and transparency,

While the Harris campaign has shown some improvement in that regard in recent weeks — including a short interview with Wisconsin public radio among a few others — it has still been frankly inadequate.

As we noted in the Aug. 12 editorial, Harris is not the typical modern candidate for president: She was not on a single state’s primary ballot or caucus ballot. Instead, President Joe Biden won victories in Democratic primaries with little attention and low turnout, as is par for the course when an incumbent president is eligible to run again, then chose to withdraw.

Perhaps Harris, having been elected on a ticket with Biden four years ago and enjoying the presumption by voters in 2024’s primaries that she would be nominated for the vice presidency again, had more legitimacy than any senator or governor who may have considered challenging her at the convention. The bar she clears still is far lower than any nominee who has gone before primary electorates to secure the nomination — which is to say, every Republican nominee and every Democratic nominee since the earlier half of the 20th Century.

To compensate for a course of events that, as we said in that Aug. 12 editorial, “unfortunately denied the public that opportunity to scrutinize the agenda or philosophy of the presumptive Democratic nominee,” Harris owes the electorate better efforts at that transparency now.

Unfortunately for Americans, the Harris campaign continues to fall short of that obligation.