In November, Redmond voters will choose a majority of the city’s City Council: three councilors and a mayor. The passage of Tuesday’s candidate-filing deadline gave them some good news and some bad news.

The good news: There will be competition for all seats.

The bad news: Two of the six candidates are married to each other, setting up a conundrum for voters who, reasonably, worry about the complications that might follow the election of an official Council Couple.

The good news first.

Two candidates have filed for the position of mayor, now held by George Endicott. The first is the incumbent, who’s been mayor for a decade. The second is Ed Fitch, who served as mayor from 1998 to 2001 following more than a decade as city attorney. Both are exceptionally well qualified.

Meanwhile, four people are running for three councilor positions, which will be awarded to the top three vote-getters. The list includes two incumbents, Jon Bullock and Jay Patrick, in addition to Josefina Riggs and Krisanna Clark-Endicott, who’s married to the mayor.

The fact that all of the seats are contested guarantees that nobody will get a free pass. Every candidate will have to make a case to voters, emphasizing his or her qualifications and fielding relevant, if pointed, questions from members of the public. Two candidates who should expect plenty of attention, much of it perhaps unwelcome, are Endicott and Clark-Endicott.

Redmond voters are less familiar with Clark-Endicott than they are with the mayor, but she is certainly well-qualified. She served as both a councilor and, later, mayor in Sherwood, though not without controversy. She resigned as the city’s mayor in October 2017, about a week before a recall election targeting her and two Council colleagues for their handling of a contract to manage a municipal recreation center. Her two colleagues were recalled by overwhelming margins, as no doubt she would have been had she stuck around.

Even if voters decide to shrug off Clark-Endicott’s resignation under threat of recall, the fact of the marriage remains and, with it, the potential for divided loyalties. We have no reason to question the good intentions of either candidate. But navigating a maze of competing interests is difficult enough for a Council member without inviting additional complications. The fact that this seems to be OK with Endicott and Clark-Endicott doesn’t mean it must be OK with voters. On the contrary, it should encourage voters to question the couple’s judgment.

So what’s a voter to do? At the very least, Redmond residents should weigh the undesirable possibility of electing a married couple to Council when weighing their votes. Some might decide that the strengths of one or both candidates outweigh the drawbacks of a joint victory. Others might decide to vote for neither out of caution.

No one, however, should forget who put them in this awkward position.