“The premise behind our campaign was pretty simple. Traditionally in our College Park City Council elections, it only took a couple hundred votes to elect a candidate to the city council, and less than a thousand to elect the Mayor. Students hadn’t been mobilized to vote locally in a long time, and in 2007 something like 7 students voted from the dorms. UMD for Clean Energy decided we would draft a platform on a host of energy, development, transportation, and environmental issues, and meet with every single candidate for the council(this ended up being 16!) about them. We would then endorse what we felt were the candidates that would champion our issues, and mobilize students on a scale no one had before to vote for the greenest candidates. Basically, almost 100% of the student voters would be voting with the environment as the #1 issue. We decided our efforts would culminate on election day with a green march from the center of our campus to city hall to vote. We called the campaign “Green for College Park”. Classes started at the end of August, and the election was on November 3rd, so we had about 2 months to organize.”

UMD for Clean Energy extensively pursued positive media coverage and engaged local blogs to reach their community particularly.

“Although we were having success on Federal climate legislation by getting into The Gazette, The Washington Post, and The Diamondback, the coverage of our local effort was lacking. Rather than settling for bumping our heads against the wall with Green for College Park media, we turned to online media. This is where I’m grateful that I had an understanding from my own blogging which sites Kenny should pursue. In our blitz, we got co-authored guest posts in Maryland Politics Blog (#1 progressive blog in MD), Rethink College Park (most popular College Park blog), interviewed on Just Up the Pike (popular Montgomery County blog), and Climate Progress(you all know that one!). I also cross-posted our press release from my blog into Itsgettinghotinhere, the main blog for the youth climate movement. The Washington Post’s blog also picked us up from all the noise, as did Greater Greater Washington. Other blogs also linked to the blogs above. We continued the cycle by putting our media on our website and facebook, and the website was linked in all of these blog posts. Thank you new media!

“This avalanche of new media brought us attention in College Park, which coupled with our outreach and lobbying efforts started creating a juggernaut as far as name recognition went. [...]

“What I learned last semester above all is how media work can make a good campaign great. I have a hard time imagining what our efforts would have looked like, and how they would’ve come across if we had not aggressively pursued the media, and relentlessly pushed our message. The great media work by Kenny and our group as a whole amplified every other aspect of our campaign. Grassroots, lobbying, membership, and motivation from seeing your efforts in a positive light in the news. It was all so much stronger because of the media. [... Read the full article]

The result of UMD for Clean Energy’s campaign to get sustainability-minded students to the polls and to endorse pro-sustainability candidates was the election of 5 environmentally-friendly city council members (out of 9) including the mayor. Certainly, their strategy and tactics proved themselves pragmatic.

However, when you have a limited sample of ideas, it’s difficult to discern which ideas are best. This is why the internet is so useful: it provides us a larger sample. It also overwhelms us. Social media mitigates the chaos: we’re forming communities of people we trust to filter the torrent of ideas.

We at Voteable are working on a website to host a community of people to recommend ideas about local elections. But even before that site launches, we want you to recommend ideas to us and to help us filter those recommendations. To paraphrase Mr. Godin, we recognize you’re probably smarter than we are.

We know you have a lot of powerful ideas. We also know from experience that ideas increase in power when they’re shared. We’ve set up a way for you to easily share your ideas with others and to vote on other ideas.

Please take a moment to share ideas. Thank you, sincerely.

Regardless of your answer, there are politicians in office all around us, influencing the development and direction of our communities.  And the majority of elected officials are local – on the city and county level.  These are real people, who might be your neighbors.  So instead of assuming that all politicians are ambitious, self-serving double-talkers and always will be, let’s think about the qualities we would like to see in elected leaders.  Then let’s find people who fit the bill.

Here’s my top 3 list:

1. Integrity. I came across a great definition of this term recently: Integrity is not just keeping one’s word, but honoring one’s word.  This means that one should make all efforts to keep one’s word, but if that is not possible, own up to it and recognize the disappointment or breach of trust it may have caused.  Candidates often have grand ideas about what they want to accomplish.  Sometimes they just can’t make it happen.  For me, integrity is also acting in accordance with one’s values.  I would like to be represented by elected officials who try their hardest to keep their word, act according to their values, and are trustworthy enough to admit when they don’t.
2. Open-minded. This country is currently experiencing a surge of hyper-partisanship, where may folks simply stop listening when the other side starts speaking (or yelling as the case may be).  But all we get with that is a pendulum of policy swinging from the right to the left and back and forth, with one side changing the policies set forth by the other.  To create lasting programs, elected leaders should seek to understand and include diverse perspectives.
3. Desire to Improve Lives of Constituents. This sounds like a no-brainer, but some folks seek office because they like to feel important.  I don’t want to waste my time (and tax-paying dollars) on elected officials who do not have their constituents interests at heart.  This includes candidates who have been bought by campaign donations from various industries or organizations; this includes those who simply want to advance their own careers.  I want a candidate who will look me in the eye and give me a good answer to the question: what will you do improve our city/county?

I could keep going with things like creativity, bridge-building, responsive, transparent, but for me many of those qualities are captured by the first three.  Imagine, what qualities would you like to see in politicians?

Go ahead, think about it.

Now, why can’t we use that as a measurement for candidates?  If you don’t think candidates live up to your standards, recruit someone who does, or consider running yourself.  There is no reason why we have to sit back and accept “dirty politicians.”

This is a map of the State House primaries in Iowa in 2008 (I just moved from Iowa so I’m a little nostalgic).  The lighter districts were uncontested in the primaries while the darker ones had challengers.  Notice how many seats were uncontested in the primary?  Lots, right?

Although Voteable is focused on county and city elections, this illustrates an important point.  Huge numbers of seats for election in this country go uncontested.  This is especially true for the local levels where positions are less glamorous. Have you ever opened your ballot to vote for Governor or Senator or President and seen lists of candidates running for those positions?  Then flip over the ballot to the county and city elections and often you see just one name followed by the line for a write-in.

What happens when a seat is uncontested?  Voters don’t really make a choice.  I’m guilty of this.  There have been a few times when I’ve just marked the box because I didn’t really feel like I had a choice. There is no debate over issues or positions, no experience to compare, no contest of ideas.

I don’t know about you but this always makes me feel a bit uncomfortable.  I don’t want a government by default.

Let’s change that.  Let’s get smart, practical people running for office.  The act of running provides for discussion of ideas and an exchange of vision.  It opens elections to public discourse and brings more attention to races that usually pass under the media radar.  Despite whatever hesitations you might have in running for office, the act of running helps our democracy function better.

Let this become a mantra for anyone who wants to make change in this country: Contest the Uncontested

Raise your hand if you agree. Fair enough — you’re being realistic. But if we were in a large room full of common people representing the population of the world, every hand would be raised. Which means two things:

1. Somehow common culture has developed a stereotype that only the dishonest are voteable.
2. Common culture prefers candidates with common sense, common honesty and common decency.

The question is, when the common people turn out to vote in the next election, will there be any sensible candidates to vote for?

We need thousands of candidates worldwide.

In each country of the democratic world there are thousands of local offices. And those local offices possess more aggregate power than the oh-so-coveted federal positions.

The United States, for example, will be truly carbon neutral only when each of its states and protectorships are carbon neutral. The states, only when the counties are. And the counties will be carbon neutral only when the cites are and the cities must begin by reforming the districts. So, the US will be carbon neutral when all its districts are.

While federal legislation wanders the halls of congress, each of the levels of local government can be instituting specific change.

And specific change will only occur if the administrators of local government act.

We, the pragmatic generation, need to take action.

1. We need to refocus the public on the effect local administrators have on the common good.
2. We need to take responsibility and run for those local offices, to be the administrators enacting positive change.

The common people will vote for the common people — the decent, honest and pragmatic people. People will vote for us.

Sure those are the public images, but really what all elections come down to are the individual voters who make a choice on who they want to be their representatives.  So how many votes does it take to win?  That of course depends on the population of your city or county and how many people actually turn out to vote. But I want to give you a few numbers to make this more concrete.

I have moved around a fair amount recently, but I lived in Des Moines, Iowa for two years before moving to College Park, Maryland.  This fall, the election for the city council member in my (former) ward in Des Moines was uncontested and the candidate who won the election won with 3207 votes.

In College Park, where I currently live, the city elects two candidates per district.  In November, there were three candidates for my district and the candidates who were elected captured 304 and 254 votes.

Des Moines is the state capital of Iowa and the largest city in the state, with a population of approximately 200,000 and College Park is a city of approximately 25,000.

Campaigns don’t always need a lot of yard signs or a lot of money.  They just need to engage enough fellow voters to win.  Check out the last election results of your own city or county and find out how many votes the winning candidates earned.  My guess is it’s not as scary a number as you may think.

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Increasingly, the masses are sitting at the top, and their weight, via cellphones, the Web and the civil society and democracy these technologies can promote, is being felt by those who have traditionally held power. Today, the weight bears down harder when the few are corrupt or fail to deliver on the promises that earned them authority in the first place.

Bono, Ten for the Next Ten

4. We’re creative.

There’s countless reasons. What are yours?