Decided at the Filing Deadline.

A case study in four states

Nobody publishes a national list of school board candidates. Most states leave filing to the county or the district, and the lists are gone by the time anyone asks for them. Four states are different. In Louisiana the Secretary of State posts each parish's candidates. In Florida the 67 county supervisors of elections do. In Minnesota and North Carolina a single statewide filing list covers every district. That makes the four a complete count rather than a sample, and this page treats them as a case study: what happens to school board seats in the places where the whole list can be checked.

The four states hold 585 of the nation's 13,019 regular school districts, 4%, and 5.6 million of its 45.3 million public school students, 12%. They elect boards four different ways. Louisiana puts every seat on a parish board up at once. Florida elects county boards one single-member seat at a time. Minnesota runs hundreds of small independent districts with at-large seats. North Carolina elects county and city boards, some of them with party labels. Together they had 544 boards with a regular election in 2026 and 2,172 seats to fill. A seat is counted as unopposed when the candidates still standing at the close of the list were no more than the seats to be filled. By that measure 1,003 seats, 46%, were decided before anyone voted. Two seats drew nobody at all.

Louisiana settled most of its boards before the vote. Every parish board elects all of its seats at once, so this year's list is the whole board. 356 of 623 seats, 57%, carry the Secretary of State's own "Unopposed" marker. On 41 of the 67 boards a majority of seats went uncontested, which means the board's majority was known when qualifying closed in August. Bossier Parish, West Baton Rouge Parish and Franklin Parish filled every seat without a contest. Three boards had a contest for every seat: Vernon Parish, City of Baker and St. Helena Parish. The largest parishes sit in between: Jefferson Parish 4 of 9 seats unopposed, East Baton Rouge Parish 2 of 9, St. Tammany Parish 8 of 15.

Florida fills its unopposed seats without a ballot. A candidate who draws no opponent by the close of qualifying is elected outright and never appears on the ballot. 84 of 205 seats, 41%, were filled that way, and on 10 of the 67 county boards every open seat was. The Florida Trib reported the statewide count the day qualifying closed in June. The split by place is the widest of the four states: 76% of seats in town districts drew no opponent, against 21% in city districts. Miami-Dade had 2 of 4 seats unopposed; Broward had none.

Minnesota and North Carolina print every name. Neither state removes an unopposed candidate from the ballot, so these seats were voted on, with one name to choose from. Minnesota: 413 of 995 seats, 42%, with the sharpest urban gap in the set, 3% of city seats unopposed against 45% of rural ones. North Carolina: 150 of 349, 43%, including the 53 seats on boards that elect on the March primary date. Guilford County Schools had 3 of 5 seats unopposed; Wake County Schools and Winston Salem / Forsyth County Schools had none.

Where the contests are missing

Across the four states the share of unopposed seats falls as districts get bigger, but not by much until the very top. Districts under 1,000 students: 49%. Districts of 1,000 to 9,999: 47%. Districts of 10,000 to 49,999: 45%. Districts of 50,000 or more: 22%, on 74 seats. By locale the order is the same: city seats 39%, suburban 41%, town 49%, rural 48%. The state matters more than the size or the place: 53% of Louisiana's rural seats went uncontested, against 21% of Florida's city seats and 3% of Minnesota's.

Most seats that were contested drew exactly two names. Of the 1,062 races that fill one seat, 586 had a single candidate, 347 had two, and 127 had three or more. Over every seat in the four states, 1.51 candidates stood per seat.

506,368 students attend districts where every seat on this year's list was unopposed, and 1.2 million attend districts where a majority was. Those are mostly the smaller districts. The five largest districts in the four states, all in Florida, had 7 of their 20 open seats unopposed, and Broward had none.

What four states say about the other forty-six

The share of seats with no contest ran from 41% in Florida to 57% in Louisiana. That is a narrow band for four states that elect boards on different calendars, in different regions, under different rules. In three of the four, city seats were less often unopposed than rural ones. Louisiana ran the other way, with 61% of city seats unopposed against 53% of rural ones. Its boards are parish-wide, so a board coded as city there takes in suburbs and farmland as well. In both states with districts of 50,000 students or more, those districts had the lowest share of any size band. The pattern that holds across all four is the one the rest of the country is most likely to share: the largest districts draw contests, and the small and mid-sized ones, which are most of the boards in every state, often do not.

The one outside yardstick points the same way. Ballotpedia's analysis of the 2025 elections it covered, 546 seats in 187 districts across 29 states, found 36% uncontested and 1.8 candidates per seat, under the same rule used here. Its districts average 26,084 students, against 9,591 for a district in the four states, and the size gradient on this page says that larger districts should show fewer unopposed seats. Read together, the two counts put the share of school board seats settled at the filing deadline somewhere between a third and a half, with the four states here on the upper side because they include so many small boards.

What this page does not do is turn four states into fifty. They were not drawn at random; they are the states that keep a complete list. A national share will come from more lists, not from these four. Kentucky and Indiana publish statewide files and will be added when the gaps described in the method are closed. The remaining states have to be assembled county by county, which is the work the School Boar database exists to do.

What the count does not say

A seat with one name on the list may hold a member nobody wanted to replace, or a seat nobody wanted. The filing lists do not say which, and this page does not guess. It does not say whether the unopposed candidate was already on the board, because that flag is blank for most of Louisiana in our records. It does not say what turnout will be, or what the boards will do. It says how many of this year's seats, in states where the whole list is public, were settled by the deadline to file.