About This Guide

This Voter Guide provides evaluations of the candidates for contested seats in the current election. The candidate evaluations are grouped into tables by office and district.

The guide does not give candidate endorsements. The goal is to provide voters with information necessary to make informed choices on election day. The Coalition does not endorse individual
candidates or promote a “slate” of candidates.

The candidates were evaluated based on:

• A questionnaire mailed to all candidates, soliciting their answers in writing. (You can review their responses on the CBM website www.bettermemphis.org)
• A series of in-person candidate interviews conducted by a panel of CBM members.

Every qualified candidate was mailed the questionnaire and contacted to schedule an interview. There is always a small portion of candidates who choose not to participate. While their names are included in the list of candidates, CBM could not evaluate them.

Coalition members form Candidate Assessment Committees to evaluate the candidates. All members of the committee review and score the answers on the questionnaire.

For the in-person interviews, the committee divides into teams,
which spend up to an hour with each candidate and each candidate is asked the same set of questions.

Each team member scores candidates individually, and the scores are averaged along with the scores from the written answers to determine the ratings for each candidate.