Local Election Season Checklist: 5 Questions to Ask Every Candidate

Your town council or school board race will not trend anywhere. It will decide how fast the pothole on your street gets fixed, whether the library opens on Sundays, and what your kids' classrooms look like in September. That is exactly why local elections reward a little preparation. You do not need a political science degree to interview a candidate. You need five questions, asked more than once, and the habit of writing down the answers.

Ask them at a forum, in an email, or on a doorstep. Ask the same questions of everyone in the race so you are comparing answers, not personalities.

1. What will you actually do in your first year?

Campaign literature is built to be agreeable. "Safer streets." "Fiscal responsibility." "A voice for families." None of it tells you what happens after the swearing-in, which is where your life actually intersects with local government.

So ask for a sequence. Name three things you would push for in your first twelve months, in the order you would push for them. Then ask the harder half: what would you stop paying for, or delay, to fund the first one?

A candidate promising safer streets might mean new crosswalks at two specific intersections, more traffic enforcement during school hours, or a full road redesign that takes four years. Those are three different promises with three different price tags. Ask which one they mean, who has to approve it, and what happens if the state grant does not come through. The answer you want is not a flawless plan. It is evidence that the person has sat with the trade-offs instead of avoiding them.

• Which of these is actually within the office's power, and which requires another body to act?
• What does the first version look like, and what is the full build-out?
• If you could only get one of the three done, which one survives?

A candidate who cannot name a single thing they would cut, delay, or say no to is telling you something useful.

2. Who is paying for this campaign, and what do they expect?

Local campaign filings are unglamorous and revealing. In a small race, a few thousand dollars from one source is a large share of the total. Filings can show a developer with a rezoning request pending, a vendor that holds a municipal contract, a union local, a party committee, or a candidate loaning the campaign money and hoping to be repaid.

None of that is automatically improper. Donors give for plenty of ordinary reasons. What matters is the pattern: whether one industry dominates, whether most money comes from outside the town, whether large loans appear late in the race.

Ask the candidate directly

Which of your donors have business before the body you are running for? Would you recuse yourself from those decisions, and would you say so publicly at the time? A confident, specific answer — with names of the bodies and the process for recusal — is worth more than a general pledge of integrity.

Rules on disclosure, contribution limits, and filing deadlines vary by state and municipality. Your town clerk or municipal election office is the authoritative source, and their website is usually the fastest place to find the actual documents.

3. What does your record show?

For an incumbent, the record is the platform. Attendance at meetings. Votes on the budget, on contracts, on zoning. How they handled a constituent complaint about a stop sign or a leaking pipe. How they behaved when they lost a vote.

For a first-time candidate, look for comparable decisions: a school board term, a library board, a nonprofit budget, a homeowners association dispute, a committee that had to allocate something scarce.

Read past the press release

Minutes, agendas, and meeting video are public and usually online. You do not need to watch hours of footage. Skim last year's budget document for the two or three line items you care about, then check how your candidate voted or spoke on them.

One question cuts through a lot of prepared answers: tell me about a decision you got wrong. People who cannot name one were either not paying attention or are not leveling with you. Both are worth knowing before election day.

4. How will we know whether it worked?

Good intentions are not measurable. Ask each candidate for a number and a date. If they want to speed up permitting, what is the current turnaround, what would they target, and where would that figure be published?

The best answer sounds boring: a quarterly report on average permit times, a target of under three weeks, presented at a public meeting every January. Boring is what accountability looks like in practice.

Ask what failure looks like

Will you publish the number even when it is bad? What result would make you change course, and how long would you give it before deciding the policy failed? Candidates who can describe their own bad-news scenario are usually the ones who will show up with a report rather than a ribbon-cutting.

5. Who gets access, and will you keep listening after the signs come down?

The last question is about the ordinary work of representation, which rarely makes a debate stage. Ask how the candidate plans to hear from people who cannot attend a Tuesday evening meeting: parents with young children, shift workers, people without a car, residents who do not speak English fluently.

Then ask about appointments. Who would they put on boards and commissions, and how would someone who is not in their circle find out those seats are open? Ask whether they would publish a public calendar and hold office hours in different parts of town rather than one familiar community room.

You can also watch for warning signs while you listen:

• Answers that consist entirely of attacking an opponent.
• Claims about budgets or crime that no one can source.
• Refusal to say what the office can and cannot do.
• No interest in the mechanics of how a decision gets made.

Take the five questions to the door

A checklist only helps if you use it. Here is a workable version for the next few weeks.

1. Send the same five questions by email to every candidate in the races you care about, and keep the replies in one folder.
2. Attend one forum with a notebook. Write down claims you can verify later instead of arguing with the person next to you.
3. Spend twenty minutes on campaign finance filings and twenty on last year's meeting minutes.
4. Verify one specific claim before you vote, using the budget document, the clerk's office, or the meeting record.
5. Talk to one neighbor who plans to vote differently from you, and ask what they see that you do not.

Remember that these are usually your neighbors, coaching a team or running the hardware store, and most of them are giving up evenings for something they believe in. Ask your questions plainly and let them answer. You will not get perfect responses. You will get a clear sense of who did the homework, who tells you the awkward parts, and who is running to be somebody rather than to do something. That is the real choice on your ballot.

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