Competition in school board elections increases 31 percent in three years
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Ballotpedia releases analysis of school board election competitiveness from 2014 - 2017
Middleton, Wis. - November 14, 2017: Compared to past years, November 2017's elections saw a significant spike in contested school board races held by America's largest school districts.
Ballotpedia covers elections in the largest 1,000 school districts by enrollment. In last Tuesday’s elections, 968 (86.04 percent) of the 1,125 candidates faced opposition. This continued a trend of increasing rates of contested school board elections since Ballotpedia's first full year of school board election coverage in 2014:
- 2014: 65.90 percent of school board candidates faced opposition in November and 32.57 percent ran unopposed over the year
- 2015: 71.68 percent of school board candidates faced opposition in November and 28.89 percent ran unopposed over the year
- 2016: 73.68 percent of school board candidates faced opposition in November and 26.32 percent ran unopposed over the year
- 2017: 86.04 percent of school board candidates faced opposition in November
The November 2017 school board elections took place in 185 of America's largest school districts by enrollment across 18 states. This year, Ballotpedia identified a 12.36 percentage point increase in the rate of contested elections from November 2016 and an increase of 20.14 percentage points from November 2014. A complete analysis explored possible factors in the spike, along with a look at candidate slates, campaign finance, and more.
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Ballotpedia is the online encyclopedia of American politics and elections. Its goal is to preserve and expand knowledge about politics by providing exceptionally high-quality, accurate, and objective information about local, state, and federal politics and policies. Its content includes neutral, accurate, and verifiable information on government officials and the offices they hold, political issues and public policy, elections, candidates, and the influencers of politics. Headquartered in Middleton, Wisconsin, Ballotpedia was founded in 2006. It has grown to include over 275,000 professionally authored encyclopedic articles that have garnered over 1 billion page views.
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