Austin Local Elections Endorsements 2022

AURA membership voted on our 2022 endorsements for Austin mayoral candidates and City Council candidates, as well as ballot propositions for Austin, Austin ISD, and Austin Community College.

These endorsements represent the choices AURA members thought were most aligned with AURA’s vision for an Austin for Everyone, with abundant, affordable housing and transportation designed for people, not just cars.

Endorsements

Austin City Council

Endorsed candidates are listed first. In parentheses, we have runners-up candidates who will be automatically endorsed if there is a runoff election where the endorsed candidate did not make the runoff. See below for an explanation of the endorsement process.

Ballot Propositions

  • Austin Proposition A (affordable housing bond): Yes
  • Austin ISD Propositions A, B, & C (info here): Yes
  • ACC Proposition A (info here): Yes

Forums & Questionnaire

To give members and the public a chance to hear from candidates on housing and transportation issues, AURA hosted several forums and asked candidates to complete a questionnaire. Links to forum recordings:


Endorsement Process

Early Endorsements

Earlier this year, we had an early endorsement election for the two incumbent seats in Districts 1 and 8 that required a 3/4s majority of members to approve the incumbents for them to get our nomination.

Regular Endorsements

For the open City Council seats, we used a ranked voting system in which we asked members to rank any candidates that they would be happy to see endorsed by the organization, so being ranked on a ballot was also an approval vote.

The highest ranked candidate in each race is endorsed, but any candidate who got a 50% approval from our members is named a “preferred” candidate and will be automatically endorsed if our endorsed candidate is not in the final election runoff.

We did this because many races had multiple candidates with great platforms that we knew would be popular with our members and likely lead to close races, and that certainly held true. Many of the races were very close, with a handful of votes separating the endorsed from preferred candidates.

Austin City Council Elections 2020

AURA hosted several Candidate Forums August-September 2020 with many of the candidates running for election for Austin’s City Council in November 2020. We recorded each candidate forum and are posting those videos here, along with questionnaire responses that we received from candidates. For our final forum, we also hosted a panel, in collaboration with Farm&City and Friends of Austin Neighborhoods, on Proposition A & B that will also be on the ballot in November 2020.

All resources relating to the 2020 City Council Race and Propositions A & B will be in this blog post to help AURA members decide on their forthcoming endorsement vote.

Recorded Candidate Forums

Forum Transcripts

We will provide a transcript copy of each forum here as soon as they are finished being edited. Stay tuned.

Questionnaire Responses

Here are all of the questionnaire responses we have received so far in a PDF. We are still waiting on some answers from D6 Candidates and will update the PDF when we receive those. Stay tuned.