AITA for rage-quitting after I lost an election?
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AITA for rage-quitting after I lost an election?
I (28f) have been a member of a large volunteer organization for several years. I am one of the longest-standing members, I have spent hundreds of hours on various aspects of it, I’ve held small leadership positions in almost every area, and I have a large amount of experience being the president of another organization as well. When I first joined, things were not doing well, so I (with others) worked our asses off to improve that, and we did.
In fact, we did so well with improving the atmosphere that we had a massive amount of incoming members, who quickly became very close with each other (something we specifically encouraged) and have absolutely no idea how bad things used to be, or how much behind-the-scenes work it takes to maintain the way things are now.
I ran for president in the most recent election. I ran against five other candidates. Four of us had years of experience and had been preparing our campaign for months/years. One person (let’s call them Alex) was extremely new (a few weeks), had zero experience at all, decided to run at the last minute, and had a very large friend group with other new members. Alex was barely allowed to run due to how new they were, but made the cut by a handful of days. You can see where this is going.
It was extremely close between me and Alex, and I lost by one vote. The rest of the elected officials were all new members, of the same friend group, also without experience.
Then, it was discovered that 9-10 votes, specifically the votes of other people in leadership positions who worked closely with me, were not counted. This was not intentional or malicious, simply a computer error.
Apparently every single one of them voted for me. I technically won. They tried to get the election results overturned because of it, but higher ups would not allow it, because they feared it would look like favoritism. At the end of the day, I was told to keep quiet and not let anyone know about this.
That brings me to my current situation. Because nobody on the new executive team has any experience, I started facing a lot of pressure to take on a lower leadership position solely to guide them and ensure our hard work doesn’t go to hell. I absolutely refused. In fact, I’ve decided to drop all leadership roles and do absolutely nothing this year. This has lead to multiple people telling me that I don’t truly care about the organization, that I’ll be responsible if it falls apart, etc. I feel like it’s a slap in the face to expect me to do what a president does without the title to show it.
Am I the a**e for dropping all leadership positions and letting the new team do whatever the hell they want to do?
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