(Best. Film. Ever.)
Philadelphians, Pennsylvanians, Flyers, and Penguins: Now hear this!
We now have every single one of Philadelphia’s 5,083 publicly elected positions address searchable and live on our RunForOffice.org site! We all know about the 25 big elected offices that are always in the Philadelphia spotlight: Mayor, 3 City Board of Commissioners, City Controller, District Attorney, Sheriff, Register of Wills, and the 17 City Council members (7 at-large, and 10 hailing from specific Districts)...but there’s also another 5,058 positions that Philadelphians can run for!
“Balderdash! What are these 5,058 positions you speak of?” (I watched Game of Thrones last night). Well, these other positions are: Judge of Elections, Majority Inspector of Elections, and Minority Inspector of Elections. There are 1,686 positions for each of those categories, and the positions are elected among the 66 electoral wards in Philadelphia (the number of how many in each ward differs). These positions are hugely important because they are responsible for the oversight of elections, and we’ve all seen how much controversy has surrounded election administration this year.
The deadline to file and get paperwork in order to run for Judge of Elections or Majority/Minority inspector is March 8, 2017 (the next election for those is not until 2017) but it never hurts to check with the city elections administrator as soon as you feel interested, while also being respectful of their time (we have found SO MANY elections administrators that care deeply about helping people run and vote in elections; it is an unsung and incredibly interesting and vital field).
If you’re interested this year, there’s still time to file to run for Pennsylvania State Senate (the 25 seats representing odd numbered districts are up for election) and the Pennsylvania State House (all 203 seats are up for election).
The deadline to run as an independent candidate and file for a state legislature seat (Senate or House) is August 1st. There are no term limits in the Pennsylvania State Legislature and the salary is $85,356/year in addition to a $159/per diem for every day in session. Contact one of our Community Strategists today if you’d like to go further in thinking about running for office.
Currently, we have volunteers working on Allegheny County, Center County, and Delaware County. If your county isn’t on our site yet, we’d HIGHLY recommend volunteering to help gather the data for your home county! Contact us here to volunteer and if anyone has any GIS skills, we could use some volunteer help in the political boundary maps arena. Oh, and please pump up our social media self esteem by liking our Facebook page and following us on Twitter.
P.S.-There was a team of political science interns at the University of Washington that compiled the data for the entire state of Washington! That means, they broke down the candidacy procedure for every publicly elected office in the state and the important election dates to help people get on the ballot. Follow this link to see the article about these great interns.
If you are part of an organization, school, or group of individuals that wants to help your the citizens in your city, county or state understand how to get on the ballot, let us know!
