SFWA 2019 election ballot set

Friday was the deadline for anyone to file for the Board of Directors of the SFWA.

Current President Cat Rambo is not running for re-election, and Mary Robinette Kowal filed unopposed.*

The present SFWA rules state you cannot run for President without having served on the board previously in some capacity. That kinda cuts down on potential candidates.

An unintended consequence of this seems to be that eleven people have filed for the three director-at-large posts.

In addition to the three incumbents - Andy Duncan, Jeffe Kennedy and Sarah Pinsker - James Beamon, Tobias Buckell, John Chu, Walter L. Fisher, Kevin McLaughlin, Eric James Stone, Peng Shepherd, and William Alan Web have all signed up.

As so often happens in bureaucratic overreach, regulatory micro-management seems to have had an unintended effect. Now there's a bottleneck at the level of director-at-large because anyone who may want to potentially serve as President in the future has to get past that gate first.

Oh, well. The leaders of the SFWA are all so smart and always know what they're doing.

Or as a wise man once said, "Only a truly intelligent person know the bounds of their ignorance. Only the haughty and over-educated know it all."

It will be interesting to see how this electoral pile on works out.

I had inquired about running for President, but as I noted above, it was confirmed that you have to serve on the board first.

Also, one thing that had gotten past me is that you cannot run for any office at all unless you've been a member in good standing for two consecutive years. I had let me membership lapse in 2017 because I was really broke. We had a serious reversal of financial fortune from 2015 to 2017; our family income dropped 2/3 as Patricia was out of work and I had to take a lower-paying job.

Mike Glyer at File 770, the most detested fan in science fiction, mocked my Presidential ambitions, and his claque of idiots and assholes also mocked me for wanting to run for SFWA office since I was ineligible, like I was trying to run a scam of some kind.

Glyer used to work for the IRS, and I'm sure most of the usual suspects - such as Aaron Pound - either have government jobs, work at universities which sponge off government funding, or are just plain spoiled and rich. They don't know what's it like to be broke and hopeless.

* Incumbent Secretary Curtis Chen is running for re-election unopposed.