As we round out Banned Books Week, here’s your reminder that a week of “celebrating” banned books isn’t enough. Now take that passion for intellectual freedom, the rights of readers, the rights of authors, and the need to protect institutions of democracy further by taking direct action.
Libraries are on the ballot in the next set of elections that will occur throughout the October and November. Libraries have always been on the ballot, of course, but with the continued rise of book censorship and attacks on these institutions, it is more crucial than ever to show up at the polls–and it’s also vital to tell everyone else who has an election to do the same. Because it is not a major election year and because it’s not even a midterm year, it is easy to overlook and forget about local elections going on this season. This is your reminder to start your research.
Two main ballot matters relate to public libraries and schools this fall. First, there will be elections in several states and municipalities for school and library board members. Who sits on these boards matters tremendously. Folks who care about public libraries and school will seek to improve these institutions and ensure that they represent the whole of a community. Folks who have an agenda seek these roles as an opportunity to push partisan agenda, including book bans, wholesale bans on topics available in the library, budget cuts, and more.
Second, there will be elections related to library funding–as we move through an era where library budgets are being pilfered for police (see Great Falls, Montana or Menominee Falls, Wisconsin or East Baton Rouge, Louisiana); where states are cutting property taxes thereby defunding public libraries (see Wyoming, Missouri, and Indiana); and where partisan politicians are changing how states fund their libraries (see Ohio), voting to sustain or increase library budgets is crucial to their survival. Greene County Public Library (OH), for example, is putting a levy measure on the ballot because the change in how their library will be funded by the state would mean disaster if they do not seek funds locally.
Here’s your reminder to get to know what is on your local ballot, how to determine the best candidate for office, and then what to do after you don your “I voted” sticker. The suggestions here will take some time, so carve out an hour or so before you go to vote. You can do these things all at once or break them up into chunks.
Find Out What’s On Your Ballot
Not every state is currently voting in elections for school boards or library boards. In some cases, this is because those are appointed rather than elected positions. The first thing to do is figure out how the process works in your community. Navigate to your local school board’s website and your local library’s website and find the page about their board. Information about the process should be readily available there, but if it is not, you may need to locate that information on your city or county’s web page. Regardless of whether these positions are up for vote this year, knowing how the process works in your community is important.
View a sample ballot for your community. You can find these in many places, including your county clerk’s office website where they host information about elections. For the Greene County, Ohio, election noted above, sample ballots for the November 4, 2025 election are on the county board of elections website and broken down by precinct. You may also be able to find information at VOTE411 or Ballotpedia.
Go individual by individual on those sample ballots and look up the candidates. Some may have no web presence at all, which might be a red flag, but most will have at bare minimum a Facebook page. Your local newspaper, if you have one, may have interviews with each of the candidates (and if you’re paywalled from this, after you cuss a bit, see if you can access the unpaywalled version via your library). Red flags in candidates for school or library board will include language like “parental rights” or “school choice.” Red flags will be clear, too, if you are voting in nonpartisan board elections and you see clear partisanship in the candidate’s affiliations or endorsements.
If you do not have board elections this year or your boards are appointed, find out who oversees those boards or departments. This could be the mayor in your community or any number of other elected city/county commissioners. Find out what their stance is on the democratic institutions of public libraries and schools. Vote accordingly. You want the person in charge of overseeing the people making library and school decisions to be someone who is a proponent of both. (This applies if your ballot includes all of these offices, too!)
Research any library or school-related initiatives. You want to fund these institutions if those questions arise. Likewise, any initiatives that may expand the size of school or library boards are a good one. You want a wider variety of opinions in these spaces, not fewer. This is precisely how some boards have been overtaken—they’ve shrunk from 9 or 11 members to 5 or 7 and created voting blocks.
You can take your notes on how you plan to vote with you to the polls. I’ve both written notes out on paper to bring and have just jotted down my plans in my phone’s Notes App. Do not, however, take a photo of your ballot itself while there. This is illegal in many areas of the country.
Identifying Strong Candidates
Look at the language used in campaigns, posts, and events used by candidates. Red flags include any array of buzz words that have proliferated over the last four years, including diversity equity and inclusion (“DEI”), critical race theory, comprehensive sexuality [sic] education, gender ideology, social-emotional learning, decreasing test scores in reading, grooming or indoctrination, liberty, book curation, vouchers, parental input/rights, and anything you may have once stumbled upon here. If you’re not quite finding anything with that language, you could always look up where these candidates stood on things like virtual school options for COVID (if they advocated “reopen the schools,” that’s a red flag, as the schools were never closed) or anti-masking/anti-vaccination debates between 2020-2022. This was particularly helpful in researching my own school board candidates, as one did not have a website or much information available at all, but I found a photo of her in the local newspaper with a giant “unmask the kids!” sign.
Dig around to see where candidates may have received money. In states like Texas, Political Action Committees (PACs) from both within and beyond the state have been flooding local elections for schools with money. Candidates who take that money have an obligation and commitment to a cause that has nothing to do with serving their community and the students within it. They’re there for the group funding them. Here’s a list of currently registered PACs within Texas; if you see a candidate has an affiliation, see what that PAC does. As with so many other things on this list, you may need to look at any number of places to find the campaign finance information. Begin at the county clerk’s website for the election, then look to the state-level elections website. You could also try a basic Google search of the “candidate name” + “finance report” or something similar.
See where candidates have spent their own money. The Federal Elections Committee requires that any candidate running for federal office submit information about where they’ve received contributions. You can look up any individual you’d like in this database and see if they’ve contributed to the campaigns of a particular party, candidate, or Political Action Committee (aka, the PACs). In the image below, you’ll see a pink arrow pointing to where you can look up the contributors. That’s where you’d put in the name of the candidate running for your local office. You can limit that search by city, or if you scroll down, you can limit by state (which might give you better information, as a candidate’s contributions may have happened when they lived in a different city). Then scroll down on the left panel to change the date range within which you search, or it defaults to very recent data. Be patient with this search tool, as it’s a massive database. It sometimes takes a minute to pull up information, if there’s any available.
You can also look up where candidates have spent money at the state level. Find your state’s board of elections website and see if they have a campaign contribution database you can search. Here’s what Illinois’s looks like.
Two additional places to turn for information on candidates include partisan voter guides–even for nonpartisan races–and your state’s teachers union. Most of those unions publish a voting guide for pro-education candidates. You can look up your state and education association to find yours (i.e., Nebraska + “Education Association”)
You’ve Made Your Mind Up and/or You’ve Voted. Now What?
This spring, two helpful posts on building voter guides ran here at Literary Activism. Frank Strong shared how he builds school board voter guides in Texas (and as of this week, just released his guide to the Texas school board elections this November), while I talked about where and how I put together a voter guide for Illinois public libraries this spring. Utilize the ideas here to build voter guides in your community as they relate to libraries and public schools. You don’t need to go by them step by step. Rather, be inspired by where and how you can spend a few hours learning about local candidates, their stances on literature and public institutions, and sharing your findings with other people in your community.
Share your work. Your neighbors and your friends trust you, and if you speak up about who you voted for—and yes, it can be as simple as “here’s who I voted for” without a why to it—you’re going to help other people make those decisions, too. Of course, if you want to share why, you do even more good.
If you’re nervous or don’t believe it is important to share your decisions, I cannot recommend listening to Eitan Hersh on Jon Favreau’s Offline podcast anymore. The episode “Are You Treating Politics Like a Hobby?” is worth listening to all the way through, but if you want the meat and potatoes only, go to Minute 27-37, which focuses on local efforts to make change, and Minute 46-51, which focuses on building relationships. You’ll hear why one of the most effective means of getting people to vote and to understand the importance of that act is by talking about how and why you do it.
Keep going. Whatever the outcome, the work is not done. Even if every pro-library and pro-school candidate wins, these institutions are still going to be under fire. The work has no end point—it’s a life long project. Take time to rest and hydrate so you can amplify the energy going into the next year . . . and realistically, the next several years. The damage being done to public institutions like schools and libraries is deep and repairing it will be a generation of work.
The Hawaii state library has banned the use of language like “banned” and “censored” in relation to Banned Books Week. The week-long event is being rebranded as “Freedom to Read week,” so all displays and imagery related to “banned” has been banned. On one hand, it’s much much better branding (though I still think it should be First Amendment week, as we’re so sorely lacking in civics knowledge and this is prime opportunity to dig into that). On the other hand, you’re not doing yourself favors by banning words or displays at the individual library level.
““The library is a neutral place and that we’re not taking sides in a culture war or political situation,” said Tom Taylor, with the Andover Public Library [KS].” This is not what a library is, and by pretending libraries are neutral, you’re derelict in your duty to be politically-for all things libraries. This attitude is why libraries are under attack and why they’ll continue to disappear.
Representative Jamie Raskin (MD-08) and Senator Brian Schatz (D-HI) are calling for an end to the banning of books across US public schools and libraries, as well as books being banned in Department of Defense Education Activity schools.
While we’re in Leander, all but four of the 40 books pulled are back on shelves from the preemptive administrative “pause,” due to Texas’s new SB 12 bill (see here).
One of the big factors leading to this rise in book bans is that we’ve lost robust (if boring!) coverage of school and library board meetings in local news. Fortunately for us, there is coverage of the latest La Grange Independent School District (TX) meeting. One of the public speakers, no joke, is making the claim Charlie Kirk was killed because the shooter had access to books in the library.
The Hill talks about how while we may see numbers of book bans drop, that doesn’t account for rampant quiet/soft/silent censorship (and this story fails to really talk about what PEN’s new report actually counts as a ban, which is reported or recorded instances–something increasingly difficult to do in an era of continued ignorance by reporters and the death of local news).
At Otsego Public Schools (MI), the short story “Ponies,” by Kij Johnson was pulled from its curriculum. It’d been used for years but now because the story is about authoritarianism, it’s apparently no longer okay to use. No, the administration provided no reason as to why it was pulled.
New York’s largest ICE facility is banning book deliveries. Prisons are the biggest institution of censorship.
“A former Wyoming library director [Terri Lesley] who was fired amid an uproar over books with sexual content and LGBTQ+ themes on youth shelves has reached a $700,000 settlement with her former employer.” This is the second such settlement this year in the US, wherein a director said they wouldn’t be banning books per board directives and they were subsequently fired. The first was Suzette Baker in Llano, Texas.
This story is paywalled but enough is before the cut to understand how bad it is. A lawsuit filed by the NAACP about the banning of Stamped: Race, Antiracism, and You from Pickens County (SC) school English classes was met with a loss. The book will remain off shelves in the district.
