Candidate for National Teachers’ Union Board of Directors Gets 101 Percent of the Vote

The National Education Association’s Representative Assembly (RA) wrapped up Sunday evening. I mentioned several new business items and amendments to the union’s constitution and bylaws that were proposed and either adopted or defeated over the four-day meeting here and here. One other adopted proposal that stood out to me was New Business Item 111: The NEA will take the lead in urging a school calendar revision for the 2020 presidential election and will encourage the closure of schools on election day…

 Speaking of elections, NEA officers are elected during the RA. The union makes the results public here and announces the results on various days of the meeting. Take a look below at the results of the NEA Board of Directors ESP At-Large Representatives.

Source: NEA Representative Assembly Election Results

One candidate received more than 100 percent of the votes. Prominent union reporter Mike Antonucci tracked down NEA’s explanation of the election result:

Bullet Voting

Many people do not vote in every race, nor do they mark all of the possible boxes in each race. When a voter casts a vote for only a single candidate in a multi-seat election, it is known as bullet voting.

Bullet voting can present special problems in calculating the results and tabulating percentages in these multi-seat elections that, like NEA’s elections, require a majority to win. (It is, for example, why a candidate can be shown to have received more than 100% of the votes.) To address these issues, NEA—like other unions and countless state and local governments across the country—uses a standard formula that creates a threshold to determine which candidates have received enough votes to win a seat in the election.

The use of such a formula allows delegates to use bullet voting while still ensuring that the results in multi-seat elections comply with NEA governance requirements.

To get more detail, please visit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullet_voting
https://www.sos.la.gov/ElectionsAndVoting/GetElectionInformation/HowAreCandidatesElected/Pages/default.aspx