List Day: 10 Questions to Ask When Doing Local Election Research

1. Is the total count of their Twitter tweets greatly out of proportion with the sum of their Followers plus their Following count (-1)?


2. Do they own a real domain name (www.candidate.com, +3), or are they camping on a subdomain (candidate.blogspot.com, +2)? Or, even worse, a social media group (www.facebook.com/candidate, +1)? Do they even have a web presence (-3)?


3. Did he include a picture of himself in the Sheriff Department coloring book passed out at SterlingFest (-3)?


4. Is their platform purely aspirational ("I want to bring transparency to government!", -2) or executable ("I will post all meeting minutes to the county website!, +2)?


5. Does anything come up when you Google their name and "controversy" (-2), "lawsuit" (-2), "embezzlement" (-2), or "llama" (+2)?


6. Does it look like they tried way too hard to get a balanced roster of minorities in their campaign images (-1)?


7. Are they wearing a hard hat in any campaign image (-1)?


8. Did she file to run for Loudoun Commonwealth's Attorney after backdating a lease agreement to make it look like she moved there in time for residency requirements while still living in Fairfax for another 6 months (-3)?


9. Is he Eugene Delgaudio (-3)?


10. Do we really need more Fire Departments (NEVER)?