If you’re considering running for open office, you should probably have pulled papers by now. The deadline for the majority of offices is this Friday, August 12. In an office when an eligible incumbent — i.e., living, not termed out, not jailed, still able to vote or re-register — decides not to run, the deadline is extended for an additional 4 days to Tuesday, August 17.
There’s a whole process for running for office. You file a notice of intent to run, and then you’re given signatures to collect. If someone has pulled signatures, they don’t have to follow through. One can pull signatures for more than one office. That’s the reason that we don’t really know, for example, whether Trevor O’Neil is running for Mayor of Anaheim or for District 6: he’s taken out papers for the former, but he hasn’t filed them yes, which leaves him options no matter what he’s leading us to believe or is telling others is his plan. Feinting towards or away from a given office is part of the game — and it’s why I’ve spent many a final Friday at the Registrar of Voters office watching the lists.
Me posing at the Registrar of Voters office with the check for my nomination fees.
The timestamp is 11:36 a.m., March 7, 2014, when I ran for DA.
I had had no idea that photo that would ever be useful.
PIC BY VERN!
City offices — Mayor, City Council, and the occasional clerk, Treasurer, or (ugh) City Attorney — are all handled by their cities’ clerks (or designee in the case of an elected clerk’s race.) Everything else — school boards and special districts — is handled by the Registrar of Voters office. You can see their current list of candidates here. (OMG, Vern — no one is currently running against Shawn Dewane for Mesa Water District Director, Division 5! We still care about this after Poseidon tanked, right? Just for old times’ sake?)
If you’d like to help us report on what’s going on with filing in your city — or someone else’s — please let us know. Huntington Beach has long published the gold standard for OC city election websites — yellow means pulled papers, green means qualified. Many cities don’t post (or promptly update) their information, and some insist on sending it only by email, reading it to you over the phone, or just doing nothing. I will try to get them to cough up the information while it’s still useful to people — but they don’t have to do much if they’re unwilling.
Voting begins in earlyish October. (Later than usual, since election day is November 8.) We will have endorsements and look forward to your comments — if you’re slinging mud anonymously, though, they may be taken down — as we near both the start of early voting and the eve of Election Day.
We could use help compiling people’s endorsements and — if possible — chronicling their fundraising activity: how much, from whom, and what independent expenditures are coming in. If anyone would be willing to compile candidate statements, we’d love help with that as well.
This will be fun! Not so much for me, but lots of you out there do seem to enjoy it!
From the archives:
I took this photo in Aug. 2014 as part of a series intended to show how incredibly and unexpectedly dead the ROV was as we approached 5:00 on the last day of filing. I would black out this shrieking candidate’s image, but SHE’S ALREADY IN SILHOUETTE SO I DON’T HAVE TO BOTHER!
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