When I first decided to run for office, there were only 2-3 lawyers in all of New York City that knew how to draft a petition to get onto an election ballot.
If you wanted to run for office, you couldn't unless one of those three people — in a city of 8 million — said they would do this for you.
That, of course, is antidemocratic. Because those three people then control the entire candidate pipeline of who can run for office in all of New York City, at any level.
So we went out and we hit the books, and we found elders in eastern Queens who finally said, "We will show you how to do this." And not only did they show me how to put together a petition, but they showed me how to properly collect a signature — because if you don't do it properly, you will get kicked off the ballot — and how to collect more signatures than the requirement, which was around 2,000 in 2018.
We set a goal of 10,000 signatures, so that there was no way that they could throw us off of the ballot. And in that process, we built the foundation that led us to winning that election.
In a lot of different places and races, there are people who could easily pay a firm to collect these signatures. And to this day, people say, "Why do you still run your petitioning process on all-volunteer basis? It's way harder."
Because this democratic knowledge needs to stay in our communities.
This skill set needs to live with the people.
And it should never be gatekept or bottlenecked ever again.
In a moment like this, when there's so much despair in the air, so much not knowing what's going on, the response is that all of us have to skill up, in every way.
Electorally. Non-electorally. We have to teach ourselves the skills necessary to build a new world.
Oftentimes, "revolution" sounds really big and splashy. But there's a lot of meetings, bureaucracy, and phone calls involved in radical changes of the world.
Petitioning is tedious, bureaucratic work. But when we go out into the community to get signatures to reelect me to Congress, we are doing the work of invitation: Join our movement for a better world.
Because this country is still a place of possibility. And together, we will win.
Will you help sustain our fight by making a grassroots contribution today?
Every donation helps us mobilize, organize, and fight for the working class in the places that need it most.
In solidarity,
Alexandria
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