Left In Lowell

As mentioned previously, we’ve been working on putting together comprehensive information on our endorsement process. It takes time to do all of these things and I hope you’ll have patience with us. The full write up of our process is now on our website. Though the last thread on this got heated and such, it does appear that a lot of people are interested in what is going on, and that is a great thing.

The endorsement process employed took a LOT of time, effort, and grunt work - including following up with candidates to give them as much chance as possible to respond; gathering the responses, candidate literature, websites, and other campaign paraphernalia; pouring over the last two years of Council votes to determine which were pivotal; working out the fairest process to weigh incumbents and challengers equally; testing the scoring to be sure the process worked well and fairly; and of course, there were the hours put in by the endorsement committee to actually do the scoring.

There were no preconceived ideas of who would get endorsed going in - in fact, it quickly became clear that it was “anyone’s guess” who would come out on top, before the process began in earnest. Each member of the committee independently produced their scores on their own before coming together.

The most fascinating part to me was the consistency of scoring once the committee brought their scores together to average. This to me indicated that, despite the disparate backgrounds and ideology of the members of the committee, that our scoring system worked well. The largest portion of the score came from the questionnaire, so it really came down to the candidates’ understanding of the issues and their ideas for Lowell. To quote the website:

With regard to the internal consistency of the process, the overlap between individual committee members’ top 9 scorers before averaging, and the top 9 endorsed in the end, was considerable. While no one subcommittee member had all of their personal top 9 scorers (before averaging) represented in the final list (after averaging), three members had their top 8 candidates endorsed the other member had their top 7 endorsed. Furthermore, every candidate in the final endorsement list but one had at least 3 subcommittee members rate him/her in the top 9. The one exception candidate was represented in all four committee members’ top ten scoring.

I find that to be a very good outcome indeed.

For all the work the candidates did sending in their questionnaires, thank you so much. I know our list of questions was long and we didn’t make it easy for you! We do sincerely wish there wasn’t a cut off and that we could endorse more than nine without diluting the impact we could have.

I would like to make one thing clear, we will not be releasing individual scores. We are not interested in preferring any candidate on the slate over any other, and our list will be alphabetically, as they are on the ballot.