I did it. I ran for office. You can see the results here: Sunnyvale District 6 Live Election Results Nov 5 2024

It was actually pretty easy to get in the race. To get on the ballot (at least in Sunnyvale, CA), you just need to get 20 signatures from registered voters. Once you achieve this, you’re considered “qualified”.

Aside from this 20-signature-requirement (and of course, turning in the signatures with some minimal paperwork to choose your ballot designation and affirm that you honestly collected all the signatures), you really don’t need to do anything else, and your name will appear on the ballot.

My campaign was pretty bare bones. It consisted of the following:

  1. Making a website: bev4sunnyvale.com (I used ChatGPT to make a scaffolding, then did some tweaking to make it mostly responsive and nice-enough-looking)
  2. Talking with a couple of friends who successfully won their seats
  3. Calculating my “win number”; something like this: https://www.ngpvan.com/blog/how-to-determine-vote-goal/
  4. Opening PayPal, ActBlue, and bank accounts for donations
  5. Collecting 100 signatures to waive the $3k fee for publication in the candidate statement booklet.
  6. Deciding on a few top priorities based on what I heard from voters
  7. Writing candidate bio statement
  8. Interviewing at several local groups to try to get endorsements
  9. Interviewing with several local newspapers for news stories about the election
  10. Putting a political advertisement in the neighborhood newspaper
  11. Designing, printing, and mailing 11,000 political mailer postcards using Every Door Direct Mail. (This involved a good amount of comparisons of different methods to find the cheapest.)
  12. Designing, printing, and putting up 6 campaign signs
  13. Filing FPPC paperwork because my spend was over $2K

I intended on going to all of the debates and events, but due to personal reasons, I needed to drop out of all of them around 1 month before the election.

In the end, I won 15% of the vote (1081 votes out of 7,169 cast, as of 2024-11-14). I spent about $5k in total.

I’m somewhat surprised to have gotten so many votes. What really makes a voter vote a certain way?

I’m curious to run again in the future, now that I have a better idea of what I’m doing! Plus, I’m still interested in making the world a better place for our children and all of the generations of children to come.

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