The 21 in ’21 Board was excited to release our candidate results this week. But our path to ensuring full representation of womxn on the NYC Council in 2021 goes beyond this celebratory moment.
Every candidate involved in the endorsement process is important to us. The new Rank Choice Voting paradigm provides us all a real opportunity to support more womxn candidates including each and every candidate who applied for endorsement. We understand that this is a new paradigm, a new perspective and a new way of doing things. The entire process and the 21 in ’21 program is designed to support all candidates in varying degrees.
We have always prioritized transparency. Every step of the process was spelled out in extensive emails to the entire membership and we worked diligently to ensure as inclusive of an endorsement process as possible. We spent hundreds of hours in endorsement preparation and interviews and 35+ hours of district panels that were fully open to the public.
We encouraged any candidate to connect with us to discuss specific membership vote total as calculated by the OpaVote platform and we will happily provide that data, along with recommendations and feedback to support their campaign strategy. That is our goal.
It does not serve the success of any of our candidates (however ranked) for the membership voting totals to be released publicly but are sharing this data with candidates directly. It could hinder other endorsements or fundraising efforts and thwart each candidate’s own ranked choice voting strategy.
We don’t want that for any of our candidates. We are all in this together and we want womxn to win.
