Over 10% of ANC districts in DC had no candidates

From CityCast DC, responsible for the article. Thank you so much for joining. Hey, thanks for having me. All right, real quick. What is an ANC? You got it right. It's an Advisory Neighborhood Commission. Confusingly, there are also Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners, which are the people that are elected to these. So. So... Advisory neighborhood commissioners are kind of your hyper local representatives. They each represent about 2,000 people. So they're the people you go to if your trash isn't getting picked up, if there's a really loud delivery truck. They also get to weigh in on things like liquor licenses and zoning meetings. So they have a little bit of power to negotiate with restaurants, developers, that kind of thing. All right, so going through your article, can we start with this graph? What am I looking at here? Yeah, so this is the share of ANC seats that have only write-in candidates. Or sorry. They have candidates on the ballot, that's the dark blue. The green is the ones that only have write-in candidates, and the gray is showing this year when there are no registered candidates by the election. So there were 36 ANC seats with zero candidates on the day of the election. Thank That doesn't mean there won't be anybody in those seats. People can still write in, and as long as that candidate actually tells you so the Board of Elections, yes, I want the job within seven days, they could still get it. much But we have no guarantee that anyone will step up into that space. for Have there been a lot of shortages before? And if not, what is the reason your for an abnormal shortage as we're seeing now? time. Well, I think that often you will get people who are write-in at election day. This is, I think, a bit more than one would expect. I do know that last year there was at least one commission that didn't have enough members to meet for a few months. It's a tough job because the commissioners aren't paid. It's a volunteer situation and they also don't have a lot of hard power. Largely, they connect people to each other and they weigh in on local issues. The council doesn't have to take their advice. They legally have to give it great weight, but that's not the same thing as actually taking the advice. So I think it's a hard gig if you want to be able to fix things and can't. And it's also a hard gig if you're doing all this work and thinking, hey, why isn't anybody paying me? Yeah, and here's a map included with your article. These are, to my understanding, the gray districts are the ones with no candidates. Yes, so the gray districts have no candidates. This also shows that the vast majority of ANC races aren't competitive. So the dark blue ones are the only ones that have two or more candidates. Thank And the other, they'll have light blue and the green. Those have one candidate only, which could be a write-in or could be somebody who is on the ballot. Right. So you say in your article, ANC 6E, that is Mount Vernon Triangle, that's where I came from this morning, doesn't have any registered, you. if they don't have any registered candidates, the commission might not be able to conduct business at all. If I'm a resident of that area, how does my life change if the ANC is not able to conduct business? Well, something that a lot of ANC said to me as I was talking to them was nobody knows that we exist until they have a problem. So you might not notice unless suddenly you can't get a new trash can from DPW or you're having a problem and you can't get the right person, you don't know who to talk to in the government. Or you wanna connect with a local business And you need somebody to make that kind of thing. I kind of think of them as like very local fixers for government problems, and a lot of them are also very active in kind of keeping track of the district's issues and trying to suggest solutions. You also might not get a voice on your behalf in a council hearing, for instance, or if a restaurant wants to open up in your neighborhood and wants to get a liquor license, they won't Going back to, I think I'm understanding throughout this interview that just because there wasn't an election doesn't mean that it will remain unfilled. There's the write-in process, right? If I'm watching this and I'm like, hey, oh man, I just read Alyssa's article. I don't want all these seats to be unfilled. I looked at the map. My neighborhood doesn't have an ANC. I want to put my name in for this. Is that possible at this time or is it too late? Today, it is too late to be elected as an ANC. You would have had to write in, you would have had to be a write-in candidate by election day. You didn't have to necessarily be registered, but you did have to literally get your name on the ballot. However, if there isn't anyone who is in that seat, you can collect, I believe it's 25 signatures, And bring them to the Board of Elections and fill that empty seat. As an ANC, if you decide to step up into that gap. I do have good news for you though, as somebody who lives in that Vernon Triangle. There were write-in candidates for all of your seats. Most of them weren't registered ahead of time. So I don't know if they actually want the position or if they are real people. But there was somebody whose name was written in. Hopefully it wasn't Mickey Mouse. Hopefully it was somebody who will say, yes, I want to be on this commission. Well, look, Alyssa, just because I came from Mount Vernon Triangle this morning doesn't mean I live there. But, all right, last thing. Sorry about that. What? That'll be it. Because we love covering elections here, and every multi-member district, so the darker colors on here, there was an election. What is the most exciting election among these, one that you enjoyed covering yesterday or one to watch for when the seat goes up again? There were some really acrimonious ANC elections in Columbia Heights and in Petworth, and one in Chevy Chase that the 51st actually did a really good job of covering. So I'm really excited to see what happens with those. That's the kind of places where somebody who doesn't work for a campaign is printing off their own flyers, signing them as private citizen and putting on top of them, vote him out in huge letters. Or putting out flyers that have like a profanity-laced quote from one of the candidates. And it's, there's... Local politics are always going to be local politics, and this is as local as it gets. Well, Alyssa, I need to start locking into these. Here is the article from CityCast DC. You can check it out yourself, but it sounds like there is hope for our local commissions. Alyssa Flowers, the data reporter for CityCast DC, thank you so much for joining me on the LiveZone today. Thanks for having me. All right, we'll be right back.