How a Mayoral Candidate in Hoboken gets on the ballot: strategies I used to collect signatures.

What I was unaware of before interning for the Dini for Hoboken campaign is that a candidate needs a certain amount of signatures to actually get on the ballot. However, this signature collecting is after months and months of campaigning. In Hoboken, if an individual wants to run for mayor, they must first meet the basic criteria of being a registered voter in the state of New Jersey, and they must be a resident of Hoboken for at least one year before the election time(even though most candidates run only when they have lived in Hoboken for several years). 

At the end of my internship this summer, I started collecting signatures to get Dini on the ballot for the mayoral election. In Hoboken, a candidate must have 100 signatures from registered Hoboken voters. However, it is important to collect more than 100 signatures because an individual can accidentally sign for more than one candidate(a voter can only sign for a singular candidate) or they may be unaware of their voting status and still sign. In both situations, this individual's signature would be disregarded. Therefore, if we solely collected 100 signatures there would be a high likelihood that some individuals who signed were not eligible to do so, and that would have put us under the mandatory signature count. To try to inhibit ineligible signatures it is crucial to thoroughly explain to the individual what criteria they must meet to sign and the purpose of their signature/where it is going. I always started my conversations with voters by asking them two questions: Have you previously signed for another candidate? and, Are you a registered voter in Hoboken? After asking these questions the greatest challenge was effectively conveying the message that signing for a specific candidate does not mean you need to vote for them and that these signatures were solely just to get a candidate on the ballot. Many individuals responded to my request for a signature by saying “I don't know who I am going to vote for” and many were skeptical of where their signature was actually going. Therefore, I changed my strategy through first explaining exactly what the signature does and then asking questions about the signer’s eligibility. 

After we collected the signatures, we had to drop them off at the city clerk’s office–the team who is responsible for filing information–and after this, Dini was officially on the ballot!