Nextdoor is a great tool for promoting Neighborhood Council elections, but you must take care to use it correctly to avoid problems with electioneering. Individual candidates may not be promoted via a Neighborhood Council’s official Nextdoor account, unless ALL candidates are being promoted equally and in a random order.

Additionally, a Nextdoor account that belongs to a private individual may promote individual candidates in a local Neighborhood Council election. For example, if you are a board member and you belong to a neighborhood group on Nextdoor within your Council’s area, you may post about individual candidates within that forum, so long as the posts are not coming from your Neighborhood Council’s Nextdoor account – and so long as you make it clear that your statements are coming from you personally, and not representing the view of your Neighborhood Council as a whole.

Similarly, a board member may not post about their own candidacy on their Neighborhood Council’s Nextdoor account, nor can they post anything else on the Neighborhood Council’s Nextdoor account that represents a personal opinion rather than a position of the board. To see how to correctly word an endorsement from an individual board member, visit https://empowerla.org/endorsements/.