Post by Lavinia on Feb 16, 2009 11:01:55 GMT -5
We're in the middle of E&GW elections (for Delegate Assembly) and the Association-wide elections are in the nominations phase and I was thinking about how the process could be improved.
I know very little about the candidates for DA in my zone. The eighty word statement that candidates are given is really not enough to make an informed decision, in my opinion. I'll bet others have similar feelings.
Campaigning can be expensive for candidates if they have to rely on sending materials by regular mail. I was looking at the Department of Labor website and they encourage unions to allow campaigning by email as long as the union already uses email to communicate with it's members on a regular basis.
Our union has already been using an "e-blast" method. This enables email to be sent out to a large group without disclosing the email addresses of the recipients. They already have this set up, so it wouldn't be vary labor intensive for them to allow candidates to campaign this way at all. The candidate would forward them the content of their email and staff could forward it to the designated list.
While I know all members don't have email, this might be one way to get more information from candidates. Another might be to have a candidate's' forum for each region or zone- although that might cost the association some $$.
I think the current system can make it difficult for newcomers to get elected. Also, we need to encourage better participation in the election process and perhaps having so little info to make an informed decision is one reason members aren't voting.
I'm not sure how we could get the association to look at these issues.
Thoughts, comments?
I know very little about the candidates for DA in my zone. The eighty word statement that candidates are given is really not enough to make an informed decision, in my opinion. I'll bet others have similar feelings.
Campaigning can be expensive for candidates if they have to rely on sending materials by regular mail. I was looking at the Department of Labor website and they encourage unions to allow campaigning by email as long as the union already uses email to communicate with it's members on a regular basis.
Our union has already been using an "e-blast" method. This enables email to be sent out to a large group without disclosing the email addresses of the recipients. They already have this set up, so it wouldn't be vary labor intensive for them to allow candidates to campaign this way at all. The candidate would forward them the content of their email and staff could forward it to the designated list.
While I know all members don't have email, this might be one way to get more information from candidates. Another might be to have a candidate's' forum for each region or zone- although that might cost the association some $$.
I think the current system can make it difficult for newcomers to get elected. Also, we need to encourage better participation in the election process and perhaps having so little info to make an informed decision is one reason members aren't voting.
I'm not sure how we could get the association to look at these issues.
Thoughts, comments?