150 candidates for Advisory Neighborhood Commission seats in DC filled out a survey about their views. You can read their responses, and we’d like to hear what you think as we decide on Greater Greater Washington’s endorsements. Can you help?

Photo by nevermindtheend on Flickr.

Every two years, DC voters elect Advisory Neighborhood Commissioners in nonpartisan races on the November ballot. An ANC is a neighborhood council of unpaid, elected representatives who meet monthly and weigh in with the government about important issues to the community.

ANCs are very important on housing and transportation; an ANC’s opposition to new housing, retail, a bike lane, bus improvements, etc. can stymie or significantly delay valuable projects, while good ANCs give the government suggestions for positive ways to improve the neighborhood and rally resident support. Races often hinge on a small handful of votes.

Each district averages about 2,000 voters; there are 40 commissions citywide, 296 districts, and 401 candidates on the ballot (some unopposed, some districts with no candidates, and some with four candidates). In the past, we’ve given reviews and made endorsements for many of the races. This year, we’d like to do an even more thorough job of evaluating candidates, but need your help to sort through the hundreds of them.

We created a questionnaire with a combination of citywide questions and neighborhood-specific questions, sent it to all the candidates, and already have 150 responses. We’d like your help to evaluate the responses and give us feedback which a team of staff and volunteers will then collate into a final “scorecard.”

Here’s what you can do:

  1. Find your ward and ANC if you don’t know them yet here.
  2. Open up the responses for your ward:
    Ward 1 · Ward 2 · Ward 3 · Ward 4 · Ward 5 · Ward 6 · Ward 7 · Ward 8
  3. Read the responses for a candidate and give your feedback on this form.

  4. Repeat for as many other candidates as you want to do. Try other ANCs, other wards — all input is helpful!

(One caveat: We copied & pasted the responses from the survey into these PDFs, and some of the formatting got messed up, like if someone had “smart quotes” (such as from writing their replies in MS Word and pasting them) or other special characters, bulleted lists, etc. Please disregard any strange underlines or other formatting quirks; the idea here is for you to see their words, not their punctuation prowess. Thanks.)

This isn’t a vote — we’re not going to decide an endorsement by tallying up the ratings. Rather, the ratings and text together will help us understand things like whether a candidate is being honest about his or her views or trying to play both sides of an issue, help inform us about factors we might not be aware of (there are, after all, a lot of neighborhoods), and otherwise evaluate the candidates.

If you are an ANC candidate and haven’t finished the survey yet, or you know someone who is, or you are or know of a planned write-in candidate, it’s still possible to fill out the survey (but hurry!)

Please get your feedback in by Friday, September 30. We’ll then publish reviews and endorsements by mid-October. Early voting starts October 22 at One Judiciary Square, October 28 at early voting centers around the city, and Election Day is November 8.

David Alpert created Greater Greater Washington in 2008 and was its executive director until 2020. He formerly worked in tech and has lived in the Boston, San Francisco Bay, and New York metro areas in addition to Washington, DC. He lives with his wife and two children in Dupont Circle.