Our aim here at Something for Cate is to provide voters with information about the preferences, candidates, and policies of those parties and individuals who make the decision to run in elections. We do this by examining websites, social media accounts, news, and video – and sometimes we have to dig for it. When we can’t find that information, especially on Independents who may not have funds or time to create and maintain a web presence, we reach out to them and invite them to comment on a series of questions that concern the major issues being canvassed in the campaign as a whole, and any areas of specific interest to their individual candidacies.

For this election, we contacted the following Independent candidates via Facebook:

• Fred Ackerman (Western Metro, Group E)
• Mehdi Sayed (South Eastern Metro)
• Walter Villagonzalo (Western Metro, Group U)

Unfortunately, only Ackerman responded to our initial inquiry. We sent him our list of questions, but received no further response.

The other candidates did not respond to our first attempt at contact. A fourth Independent, Esther Demian (Western Metro), was unable to be contacted at all.

This is both deeply frustrating and sad. Often there are nuggets of gold hidden in the policies of these Independents. There may also be landmines. The problem is, we can’t inform you, our readers, if we don’t have anything to explore.

As things stand, we can’t provide either positive or negative recommendations. We don’t think anyone should infer anything about these candidates’ motivations or commitment, either. Our reason for this post is to let readers know that we have not overlooked or discounted these Independents, but were just unable to find any details to bring to you all.

It’s possible one or more of these candidates will see this post. To them we’d like to say, drop us a comment. We’d still love to correspond with you.