Since I’m in a typing mood, here’s how AFT teacher union elections work. (At least in the big city where I worked.)
Local elections are done by slate voting. The incumbents (all leftists) field a slate. Challengers do too. The incumbents have use of the union hall for rallies. They have use of the membership mailing list. And they have full-time staff people who visit schools to campaign.
The challengers can get use of the union hall and the membership mailing list. But only by jumping through all sorts of hoops. It’s very difficult. And the challengers can’t visit schools to campaign. They are busy teaching.
And now the best part. The local president can find reasons to void an election. In all my years in the union, the union bosses lost only once. That was amazing. But we didn’t get to celebrate for long.
“There was no quorum,” said the union president. We must re-vote, this time by mail-in ballot.” Guess who won the re-vote? It sure wasn’t the challengers.
A group of us went to see a labor lawyer about this. He was sympathetic. But he didn’t take our retainer money. Everything the union president did was within the union bylaws, he said.
On the state and national levels, there’s not even a membership vote. Hand-picked delegates go to conventions. State and national leaders are chosen at these conventions.
That's much worse than I thought. And it explains a lot... Again, thanks for sharing. (do you see any changes that could be made to state laws to blunt some of the worst stuff liberal education unions are doing?)