Demand Online or In-School Voting in UFT Elections!

Did you know that other unions across the country are able to vote for their executive leadership positions online, yet your union doesn’t permit it? The current voting process in the UFT, which only permits mail-in ballots, is extremely outdated and burdens educators in the process.

So join your colleagues and call on UFT leadership to modernize and expand voting options in the next Executive Board Election by allowing electronic and/or in-school voting. 

Concerningly, the current process discourages voter turnout by creating excessive and burdensome paperwork. It also predisposes thousands of ballots to be lost or never arrive in the first place. After UFT members were asked to update their home address, seek a ballot in the mail, complete it, and then finally return it in the 2022 Executive Election, just 26% of members cast their ballots, and fewer than half of those ballots were current classroom educators. This is a clear act of voter suppression, which union members have experienced as years of extremely low and disheartening voter turnout.

With the UFT being the largest union local in the country, our voting systems need to be a model of democracy and should be modernized – not restricted – to maximize the engagement of our members.

Furthermore, limiting election voting to mail-in ballots clearly violates Article V, Section 4 of the UFT Constitution, which states that voting methods should be consistent across elections. And in the 2021 school-based elections voting was held via phone call, thus demonstrating the ability and security of expanding voting access beyond outdated methods.

We need the UFT to adhere to its own constitution and end restrictive voting practices in executive elections by providing more ways to engage educators in the voting process, similar to how it did in the 2021 school-based elections.

So JOIN US and SIGN TODAY! We need our union to expand voting to include an in-school and/or online voting option in the next Executive Board Election to ensure all educators are heard.