Message to all 2023 Berkeley Heights, NJ Candidates

BHCW will seek to continue helping the community make effective decisions in local elections. This year we wanted to reaffirm some of our ground rules and also present some changes that will take place.

(1) As always, every candidate for office can publish content on our mediums (text, video, etc).  This content has to be more than a campaign commercial and should include information connected to at least one of two areas:

-Qualifications/Background
-Policy Positions/Platform

(2) Fact-based criticisms of other candidates’ policy positions and policy statements (past and present) are allowed. Criticisms of political ideology are also allowed as long as they are, again, evidenced within the body of the criticism and it directly connects to local issues.

These criticisms must be connected to evidence that exists in writing or video. Stories about what a candidate did or what their supporters did at a community event or location appear to come up every election year – it always ends up being exaggerated or straight-up horse shit. Please don’t start that nonsense here.

(3) What is not allowed:

• Personal/Private information about a Candidate irrelevant to the job requirements of the office being sought.  
• Attacking a Candidate’s Family Members
• Attacking a Candidate’s Supporters or Critics
• Screenshots from other forums (keep those conversations where they started)
• Name-calling

To this end, we ask candidates to visit the commitment link below, sign and submit it as a public pledge to run their campaigns (print, media, and on the ground) according to the guidelines above.

We will publish the names of candidates who sign the pledge.

Now onto some other loose ends…

If a candidate and their supporters choose not to use our mediums, that is entirely up to them – but it is not evidence of bias on our part.  

We have invited every town council candidate to contribute and appear on Night Watch.  Please don’t give me shit if some candidates use our platform to connect to voters while your candidate doesn’t- talk to them – leave me out of it.

We will do the same when we find out who the BOE Candidates are.

As we have done in the past, we will provide debate questions to candidates – they can answer them if they so choose. We will also invite candidates to participate in a debate we will host. The only rule in the debate will be time limits and that questions are kept within the parameters above.

Each candidate will get a page on our site for endorsements from community members. We will update those pages with endorsements submitted to BHCW. We will post their endorsement pages on social media outlets once a week (unless there is nothing new from the last time we posted) – posting every endorsement as they came out on our socials last year flooded our pages.  

BHCW, as an entity, will not endorse any candidate. However, we will grade candidates according to policy positions, specifics, and commitment to areas we consistently talk about (transparency and evidence-based decision-making) – what individual contributors choose to do is up to them.

Link to 2023 Candidate Commitment Form