Who Should Run, And Where

Citizens recommend people they think belong in office. Over a year that produces a long list of names with nothing next to any of them, and that is not a plan. This is the run that turns it into one — a named challenger per seat, published with the arithmetic that put them there and a reason beside every name that did not get one.

The run reads the approved roster, keeps three separate numbers about each person, walks the seats from the most senior downward, and publishes a reason for every name it did not place.

What it does

It reads the approved roster and nothing else. A citizen's recommendation is a request, not an entry: it is invisible to this run until an admin approves it. Otherwise anyone could put a name on the movement's slate with a form.

For each person on that roster it keeps three numbers that are never collapsed into one. How they came out against the published qualification areas. How much the movement actually knows about them, published as "64% known". And office readiness — how senior an office their record shows they are prepared to hold, a statement about level, not about virtue. Someone can be well known and thinly qualified, or strongly qualified with no executive record.

Citizens separately cast one to five stars against eight named offices, from state assembly and mayor up to president. An office fit combines those stars with how far the person's readiness sits from what that office demands. A strong fit for a state assembly seat and a weak fit for a governorship is a normal result, and the page says it that way.

What puts people in order for a slot is the combined qualification result at the movement's declared weights, and nothing else. Home state, party, seat kind and constitutional eligibility act only as filters: they decide whether a person is in the contest, never how high they come out of it.

Then the seats are walked from the most senior downward, and every position carries one slot per party. At each open slot the highest-placed eligible person takes it, and one person takes one seat. A seat's demanded readiness is a soft floor: someone placed under it is recorded as a stretch with the shortfall named. Naming the stretch is the point.

Every name that did not get a slot comes out with a reason attached — runner-up by a stated margin, held back for an unsourced claim or a constitutional bar, or out of open slots. Nobody is deleted. An unfilled slot is published as a recruiting signal, not an error: "no contender for this seat yet" is what the movement needs to see.

The goal it serves

The movement's hardest question is not who is bad? The voting record already answers that one. It is who should we run, and where? — and that question is normally settled in a room the public never sees, by people whose reasoning is never written down. A slate arrived at that way can only be accepted or ignored.

A captured incumbent is replaced at an election and nowhere else, and the way that fails is familiar: three plausible challengers split the same voters and the incumbent takes the primary with a third of the vote. Deciding before the primary which one name a seat gets behind is the whole lever. This run makes that decision in the open, on weights published in advance, so a visitor can interrogate it instead of trusting it. See Replacing Captured Incumbents and Good New Leaders.

It also keeps the decision honest about level. A good organizer with no executive record is not improved by being pointed at a governorship. The ladder turns "better suited to a state assembly seat" into arithmetic instead of an editor's instinct — the same reason influence inside this movement is earned in public and capped.

What keeps it honest

• The wall holds. Nothing this run computes can ever move a Monkey Award or a Llama Award — those two are fed by the in-office voting record only. What comes out of here is published as the Flamingo Award, and a person who holds both kinds carries them side by side.
• A number with no traceable evidence is rejected, not published with a caveat. A person the movement cannot yet trace falls to the Flamingo's unknown state with a stated cause — never to the "assessed and nothing earned" state, and never to 0%. Every placement is published beside its known percentage, because a placement is a stronger claim than an assessment.
• An unfilled seat prints its threshold and the best result that failed it. A threshold nobody can see is a threshold nobody can argue with.
• The run does not publish itself. It seals a dated edition and a difference against the last one; a human reads that difference and commits it, and the commit is what "approved" means. A throwaway simulation can be run at any time and never moves what visitors see.
• A change between editions carries its reason. Moving a person from a governor slot to a House slot is usually a fact about who else entered the pool, and it is stated that way, not as a judgment about them.

Works with

• The Rosters — the approved roster is the pool this run reads, and the only pool it reads.
• Your Seats And The Seat Map — the seats this run fills are the ones a visitor sees on their own district page.
• The Politician Record Page — where a placement lands: the assigned seat, the reasoning, and the other seats the person was weighed against.
• The Qualification Catalog — the areas and weights the ordering is computed from.

Where to go next

• Good New Leaders — who gets on the roster, and how anyone can put a name forward.
• Replacing Captured Incumbents — the strategy this run serves: one challenger per seat, agreed before the primary.
• The qualification areas — the eighteen named areas, and the weights that decide the order.
• The wall — why what somebody said can never move the award built from how they voted.
• Take Action — recommend somebody, vet a challenger, or cast your stars.