I am planning on writing stories here on Daily Kos on a semi-regular basis of my experiences running for office on a local level in a township here in PA. I hope my experience helps illuminates the process and takes the mystery out of running for office. As part of the process, I feel strongly that any candidate needs to hit the streets and meet their constituents. For the primary I am mostly meeting Democrats as they are the only ones who can vote for me in the primary. For the larger election in November, I will expand this base. I am walking ringing doorbells as a volunteer for other candidates, but when they find out I am a candidate, they want to hear my story, my biography rather than the stories/biographies of the other candidates that I have handouts for. We are using the minivan app which I find very easy to use. I am covering a District in my area. I only have 6 houses left in that district which I will finish off this week. It has taken me about 7 or 8 hours to cover this district. Of course I am doing all the driving and entering the data too. I have not collected any donations and do not have any funds for my campaign anyway. I am looking into the regulations in case I do get donations. If I do I will just ask for small donations and will only use them for campaign materials. The process in PA to become a candidate is straightforward once you find someone who knows the process. You get the petition form. These can be had from your local party organization or you go to the County Elections Office likely in the County Courthouse. For Auditor I need 10 valid signatures. They have to be Democratic signers as this is for the primary. So I obtained 15 signatures to guarantee that even if a few are successfully challenged I will still have 10. The local Democratic organizer drove me around to meet Democratic registered voters in one evening and had them sign the form. My wife also signed the form as she is a registered Democrat in our community. I then filled out the financial conflicts of interest form. To be properly registered a copy of the petition goes to my municipal office and the original of the financial conflict of interest form. The original of the petition and a copy of the financial conflict of interest form is turned in to the County Election office in the County seat. If you get this wrong you will not be a valid candidate and your name will not appear on the ballot. In PA you can still be a write-in candidate but to be able to win you need to register all the same but you do not have to provide the petition. I do not know about the financial conflict of interest form. This all needs to be done by a due date. You can not be late. For some positions you also need to get a due diligence background check and you use the firm they tell you to use. Almost all of these forms can be obtained online at least in Pennsylvania but the actual dropping off of the forms are done in person. The background check is also done online. I did not have to do it as an auditor is unlikely to work with children as part of their job. I will post some of my experiences knocking on doors in my next post. I am also in a local Indivisible group. I hope my postings help others run. We really need to get good people into local offices. This is how you build a progressive party from the bottom up, IMHO. I may run for another office if good people do not run for them later. But this is a start.
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