UFT Election Update: Today is the Drawing for Slate Positions - #MORE2016

I'm heading over to meet a teacher for lunch who has volunteered not only to put #MORE2016 election leaflets in the boxes of his own school but to do 5 other nearby schools. The lunch is on me - and if you want to have lunch on me (not literally) send me a list of schools outside yours you are covering.

I will be throwing the tumbling dice

Then I am off to the UFT to take part in the drawing for slate positions on the ballot. A caucus needs to meet the threshold of 40 candidates in order to get a slate line. If they don't have 40 candidates, as long as the candidates get the petitions signatures, the candidates would have to run as individuals.

This 40 candidate threshold was part of the UFT election announcement and ratified unanimously by the election committee which consists of representatives of all three caucuses that have declared they are running.

Some candidates have been ruled ineligible to run due to their not being a member of the union - ie, not paying their dues. I have heard that 2 of the roughly MORE/New Action 300 candidates have been so ruled and we accept that decision as our bad for not making sure all our candidates were union members.

We will get the exact numbers this afternoon and I will be rolling my lucky dice to try to get MORE/New Action the first position on the ballot. We will then draw for each candidate's position on the rest of the ballot. In reality, 90 percent of the voters just check one of the slates and send back one sheet instead of going through the 20 page booklet picking out candidates. When we do our post-election number crunching we ignore those non-slate ballot votes because they vary so much and do not give much of a picture.