Candidate Surveys Are Rolling In But We Want Even More
Lots of candidates have yet to send in their Q&As. There’s still time but you’re cutting it close.
About 320 people are running for offices ranging from governor to county councils in Hawaii this year, and Civil Beat is offering all of them a chance to tell voters where they stand on important public policy issues.
In early June, we emailed our Civil Beat Candidate Q&A to everyone who’s running in the primary. So far we’ve received 140 responses — that’s a lot more than the 104 candidates who sent back the surveys before the 2016 primary. But that’s still well under half of the total.
We’ve published 106 so far. The easiest way for voters to find them is to follow the links on our Hawaii Elections 2018 Primary Ballot.
We’re preparing a lot more for publication this week. There’s a growing sense of urgency, because mail ballots will be in a lot of voters’ hands soon, likely going out in the mail at the end of this week.
There’s still time for candidates to take advantage of this opportunity by emailing your completed survey to candidate@civilbeat.org. That’s also where you can send us a note if you haven’t received a survey or need another one. If you already sent your Q&A in but haven’t seen it published yet, please let us know; we still have about 30 in hand that we are working to publish but we’re happy to check.
This year, we’ve heard from some of you who are concerned about the process and the timeline for publishing the surveys.
Here’s how it’s worked so far:
• All the surveys were emailed out at the same time. We received a glut of responses early on.
• It takes a bit of time to process and build these into our system, including adding the photo and the links to other candidates in the same race. Whenever possible, we give priority to contested races and to the responses of candidates whose primary opponents have already been published. We try to pair candidates in the same race when possible.
• This being Hawaii, most of the candidates are Democrats, but we don’t give preference to any political party. We’ve also published the response of Republicans, Libertarians, Green Party members and dozens of nonpartisan candidates.
• Survey responses are initially published on our home page, and they live on in our Elections 2018 section along with other political coverage. But again, the easiest way to find a particular candidate or office is to follow the links at Hawaii Elections 2018 Primary Ballot.
Find more information about the upcoming primary in Civil Beat’s Hawaii Elections Guide 2018.
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