For Unity's cast of patronage thousands and 800 candidates it is easy.
For caucuses made up of working teachers and support staff it is an often tedious and time-consuming process. I've been involved in handing the process over the past 4 election cycles (2004, 07, 10, 13).
You know in the NFL and NBA they have experts to deal with the salary cap who are known as 'Capologists"?
I am a Petitionologist, along side Ellen Fox, who has been doing this stuff even longer than I am since she was in New Action from the 80s on.
We have evolved a system we hope will be the least taxing on the MOREs out there doing the hard work of going around their schools getting people to sign for the officer slate (900 sigs needed) and all the other people - 100 needed.
When you consider that there are 42 Exec Bd divisional candidates broken down into Elem (11), MS (5), HS (7) and Functional/Retirees (19) who can only get sigs from their particular divisions this process turns into somewhat of a military operation.
All the At-large - 48 Exec Bd, 750 AFT/NYSUT Delegates can have anyone sign but explaining this to people every 3 years is wrenching. So I no longer bother - here are your petitions and who can sign and go to it.
The more candidates we have the more petitions have to be signed. And since many people are not in schools big enough to get 100 signatures, the caucus has to set up events where people can gather to sign masses of petitions to cover the petition gap - call it closing the petition gap.
Unity has a meeting tonight right after the DA with food and people dancing on tables to entice the Unity faithful into a giant signing party. MORE will retire to the Blarney Stone post DA to hold a mini-signing party and to distribute the petitions and will follow up at its meeting on Saturday.
Since I also manage the candidate info spreadsheet and do some recruiting of candidates, I see the MORE portion of the slate is over 150 people with more coming in every day. [NOTE: YOU TOO CAN STILL SIGN UP TO RUN WITH MORE FOR AFT/NYSUT DELEGATE SINCE WE CAN RUN 750].
This is without all the New Action people added in.
So there is a lot more work ahead over the next 6 weeks for the MOREs while I sit back and watch it all unfold until the petitions are collected and organized when I spring back into action. This can be a distraction from going out and doing any heavy campaigning but our philosophy has morphed - the heavy lifting in terms of building a ground game is in the schools where MORE has people and people are going in with an attitude of using the petition campaign as a way to engage people in the election at this early stage and the prep them to vote when ballots go out May 6.
In the meantime I will help get out the 20,000 copies of the initial MORE Literature since starting today any UFT member can go into any school and stuff the mailboxes.
Twisted sisters
The naked fact is that the election is so stacked that MORE can't win the entire election but can win somethings. Some idiots are out there spinning this into "MORE doesn't want to win." But these same people are proven liars, so discount what they say.
Anyone who believes MORE is putting all this effort into the petitioning campaign and doesn't want to win has been frolicking in a field of shrooms.
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