To appear on the ballot you must complete the following.

Residency. State where you live and how long you have lived there. This is checked. If it is wrong you are removed, and people have been.

Signatures. Collect the required number from qualified voters in the district. They are counted and a portion of them are verified and invalid ones are struck. This is real work and it filters out anyone unwilling to do real work for a fortnight.

The fee, or the papers in lieu of it. Pay it or file the alternative. Both are checked.

The declaration. Sign your name, under oath, stating that you are who you say you are, that you meet the age and citizenship requirements, and that you intend to run.

Disclosure. File the financial statements the office requires, by the dates the office requires them, and continue filing them.

That is the form. It is administered carefully by people who administer it carefully, and every item on it is verified, and someone loses their place on a ballot over one of these every cycle.

It does not ask the following.

Whether you have done anything. There is no field for a record. Holding an office is not required and neither is having done the work of one. Being available is sufficient, and availability is not a qualification, it is a condition. A person who has never done the job and a person who has done it for twenty years complete the identical form and it comes back identical.

Whether anyone credible is running against you. The form is filed alone. It cannot know that in a field of two, being the other one is a complete platform — that it requires no record, produces no information about you, and that a candidate can be carried the entire distance by the opponent without ever being examined. Nothing in the process establishes whether such a candidate would be better or worse in office. It establishes only that they were second on a list of two.

What your sentences mean. Every claim a candidate makes in public is fact-checkable and gets checked. A statement that contains no claim does not. There is a way of speaking that consists of describing a settled condition as an emerging one, in the present progressive, so that a completed fact arrives sounding like a warning. It cannot be corrected because nothing in it is false. The room hears a position. The form has no line for the difference between saying a thing and knowing it, and neither does the room, at the speed a room moves.

Whether you intend to still be there at the end of it.

This is the one worth sitting with, because it is the only question on this page that already has an answer at the moment of filing. The candidate knows. Nobody asks, nothing records it, and leaving early carries no penalty of any kind. The seat has a term. The person does not.

When someone goes, the office is filled by whoever is next in the order of succession, and that person is now in a job nobody elected them to. Every cost of that lands on people who were not consulted, and there is no ledger anywhere it can be entered on. It does not appear against the departing officeholder's record. On that record it appears as experience, and within a day of the next thing opening, their name is floated for it, by people doing ordinary journalism correctly, because that is how the sequence works.

The form asks where you sleep and whether you paid.

The higher education desk is written by Never Wrong, who covers the Ivy League and has been asked to watch the presidencies.