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Gary Johnson is on the ballot in all 50 states and DC. If any third party gets above some level (5%?) of votes, they get funding in the next election cycle. Also, the top three candidates in the Electoral College are considered by the House if it comes to that.

I cannot attest for the accuracy as I didn't look into any of the sources:

http://www.redstate.com/aarong...
https://www.commentarymagazine...
http://lwv.org/blog/georgia-ex... (indicates it was people listed in the wrong district/going to the wrong district)
https://www.truthorfiction.com... (some claims true, most false, but the true ones are very interesting)

Hey all,

Just remember, saying you're all for it on an internet forum doesn't actually do anything... Write your elected officials in support of S.1714, the "Open College Textbook Act of 2009". Here are some links, just in case you're THAT lazy....

http://www.usa.gov/Contact/Elected.shtml
https://writerep.house.gov/writerep/welcome.shtml
http://takeaction.lwv.org/lwv/dbq/officials/

Remember to get the senate AND the house.

-T

(I posted this as a follow-up to a child of this topic, but am now appalled that the people crying, "Get informed!" are not helping show people how that actually can get informed.)

The League of Woman Voters publishes a very well respected election guide, known for its even-handedness.

Sure, it won't get every last nuance and will ignore the scandals - but the original question was concerned with a candidate's positions, not who they slept with.

It's too late in the East to use this, but they publish it every election year. Remember it.

Horseshit.

The League of Woman Voters publishes a very well respected election guide, known for its even-handedness.

Sure, it won't get every last nuance and will ignore the scandals - but the original question was concerned with a candidate's positions, not who they slept with.

Not voting because you don't think you are informed enough results in fewer votes by smart people.

That said, it takes all of half an hour to get up to speed enough to vote. Check out the info from the League of Women Voters. Or, if you don't trust them, there are tons of sources where you can get information with your favorite flavor of spin on it. You're not being an irresponsible citizen for staying home, you're being irresponsible citizen for failing to make the slightest effort.

My state allows early voting, so I already voted last week, but before doing so I wrestled with a similar problem. I knew I wanted to vote for governor and congress, but there are plenty of smaller statewide races I knew nothing about. Hopefully my experience will be useful to some folks.

First of all, if you don't think you have a firm grasp on the issues, you have three options:

1. Vote randomly, or along party lines
2. Abstain from voting
3. Educate yourself about the issues and candidates

Logically speaking, option 1 can indeed come back to bite you; not knowing where a candidate stands on the issues gives you very little insight into his motivations and actions. I highly recommend choosing another option. Still, if you know you like a particular party platform, the odds are in your favor with a straight party ticket.

Option 2 is a perfectly safe option. It is as much your right to abstain from the voting process as it is your right to take part in it. In fact, even if you believe yourself to be well-informed about candidates and issues, you may find that you do not prefer one option to another.

I chose option 3, and though it took me the better part of a day, I believe it was worth it. There are several resources at your disposal. Various organizations publish handy voter's guides. For me, the most useful was the voter's guide provided by The League of Women Voters. They sent questions to all the candidates, and the candidates provided answers. This was a very useful, no-nonsense, no-bias, no-mudslinging resource.

Beyond that, most newspapers have found their way online these days, and it is likely that your local newspaper(s) will have endorsements listed online. My city has a newspaper, and alternative newspaper, and a student newspaper, all of which endorsed particular candidates (and gave their reasons for doing so). You may not agree with a newspaper's reasoning for its endorsements, but that doesn't make it any less valuable a resource -- you can always vote the other way.

With these few simple resources, I felt I knew enough about the candidates and issues on the ballot to make an informed decision. There's a lot of distortion and spin in today's media, but it is not impossible to find straight answers if you're looking for them. Bottom line: You owe it to yourself to get educated on the issues.

So to answer your question, yes, I believe abstaining is a better choice than an uninformed choice. But an informed choice beats either of them, hands down.

In the time it takes someone to whine about being uninformed, they could be researching their vote choice. Almost everyone has a sample ballot online. The League of Women Voters provides a lot of information for just about everyone. Campaign finance records are online even if you don't have the time to study them in detail. And there's plenty of stuff on candidates just from googling around. If I can't make an informed vote, I leave it blank. For example, I researched the entire ballot for my part of California kind of last minute. Some things I had already decided to vote for (eg, the Governator for another four years). But turns out I missed a choice for school board, so I left that blank. It took a couple hours (plus consider time that I had spent earlier reading up on the propositions) and I'd rather have spent longer (I hadn't budgeted the time before a major weekend trip). I did make sure I voted against the clown, Bill Lockyer who was suing automakers for global warming.

But that discriminates against mutes! As well as people who have lost their voices/have sore throats, etc. And after 30 or so candidates, judges, and issues, there are bound to be some of those.

It also allows underage individuals (particularly babies) to vote, sometimes even disproportionately!

The League of Women Voters might even claim that women can't cheer as loudly as men!

See also the League of Women Voters. They try to present a non-partisan, regulated forum for the messages of candidates and constitutional measures.

Of course, not all candidates submit statements, but a wide majority do, even in Minnesota.

Actually, my post was more on-topic than yours, I believe.

I'm fine with other people distilling research to make it easier for a voter to grok. But it's still research, and should be done by any voter. Uninformed voting favors those with more money and name recognition instead of those who will do a better job or better represent the voter's interest.

In general, I think uninformed voters will almost always cause more problems for a democracy than people who don't know or care staying home, and thus I tend to oppose knee-jerk "get out the vote" contentless campaigns.

Just to add some content to my post, I'll post a few sites where you can do some meta-research (read distilled opinions about candidates and issues) in addition to the http://www.vote-smart.org/ site mentioned in the grandparent post:
* League of Women Voters (look for local leagues for local issues): http://www.lwv.org/
* FactCheck.org: http://www.factcheck.org/
* Google for your city/state and "voting information": http://www.google.com/

Correct, the power utilities figured prices would drop in a deregulated wholesale market and they would make out by selling at a fixed retail price. The fixed retail prices were tied to a 10% rate cut and a bigger surcharge called the Competition Transfer Charge (CTC), and these were to last for 4 years or until certain bonds were paid off, whichever was earlier. If it sounds confusing, it was. You'd really have to try to come up with a worse deregulation plan than that. Anyway, in 2000 San Diego Gas and Electric had already paid off its bonds and retail prices were no longer fixed. That really was the first warning. Customers saw their power bills triple that summer. More history of the power crisis here.

The state of Pennsylvania site was nice enough to include not only the location of the polls for my district, and the hours they would be open, but they also told me I was going to encounter Sequoia electronic voting machines.

The state of Ohio's link doesn't appear to contain that information, unfortunately.

It looks to me like this site offers such information only for California and Ohio. Voters in other states should try The League of Women Voters' Voter Information pages, though there's not as much information there; mostly links elsewhere. YMMV.

From the article: Reform legislation, the 2002 Help America Vote Act (HAVA), may actually facilitate Republican intimidation of minority voters and reduce Democratic turnout.

I was reading the article and I came across this. Searching for it leads to here and here amongst the millions google returns. I don't understand how Republicans can use this to intimidate minorities. I could see point #3 from the second link "Develop a statewide, centralized, electronic list of all eligible voters" could be viewed upon as an attempt to exclude but then the next bullet point states "Ensure that ID requirements are fair and nondiscriminatory."

I know nothing about HAVA. Could someone comment on this?

Now of course, you have to consider whether you believe what the candidates have to say about the issues, but that's another topic :-)

It has been suggested that DRE machines are inherently subject to fraud unless there is an individual paper record of each vote. This seems extreme. DREs are extremely sophisticated machines and most DREs store information in multiple formats and in multiple places within its program. To tamper with a DRE someone would need to know each and every format and storage capacity and be able to manipulate it undetected. Additionally, it must be remembered that DREs are not an election system unto themselves; they are simply an instrument within a complex election system. The key is to design an overall system that builds in multiple checks making it improbable that the system will be tampered with.

The LWVUS does support an individual audit capacity for the purposes of recounts and authentication of elections for all voting systems, including, but not limited to, DREs. The LWVUS does not believe that an individual paper confirmation for each ballot is required to achieve those goals; in fact this is unnecessary and can be counterproductive. An individual paper confirmation for each ballot would undermine disability access requirements, raise costs, and slow down the purchase or lease of machines that might be needed to replace machines that don't work. Simply because a voter verifies their vote on a piece of paper does not guarantee the same results have been be recorded within the machine and vice versa. And why would we assume that, if the total from a paper count and the total from a machine count are different, the paper count is accurate?

I thought I was someone who would automatically support your causes you champion until I read the NYTimes editorial about your inexplicable support for paperless Diebold voting machines, and your willingness to take bribes for the disenfranchisement of women.

Surely you are aware that you are in the pocket of a sleazy company which is itself in the pocket of the Bush administration, and both will do their best to see to it that women die rather than receive an abortion or govenment support in raising children.

To lobby for a fundamentally corrupt and opaque voting system puts you at odds with those who spent their lives fighting to give women political representation. You are voluntarily laying it down.

If you have abandoned your fight for the fairness of our democracy, there is no need for your organization to continue. And if the soulless corpse of your PAC attaches like a leech to the belly of Diebold, you owe it to women to change your name to something which better describes your current motivations, something with the word "WHORES".

My favorite argument against paper trails is how insanely expensive these machines would become. Really? I didn't know that the corner Kwik-e-Mart had one of these "expensive" machines to print a receipt for my $0.50 pack of gum. As far as I know, all ATM's have paper trails. How is it feasible to record a $20 ATM withdrawal but not a vote for supreme emperor of the earth for 4 years?

-l

-l

Any one who loses the election will request a recount... of all the paper ballots.

What if N paper ballots/receipts go missing, with N > than the winning margin? A lot seem to go missing currently. There is some consensus that there does not need to be a paper audit trail at the voter level. I agree; there are too many voters and our 18th c paper system is already badly creaking under the weight.

There is another solution, albeit a non-technical one (perish the thought): devolve critical election or representatives to referenda (with some exceptions; not everything can be put to popular referenda).

The Internet was meant for this.

The League of Women Voters produces just such a set of pamphlets, at least here in the state of Washington. While it can be argued that the LWV probably leans to the left a little, the pamphlets are generally very well written, extremely balanced, and contain no advertising.

As to the parties issue, I think that a big part of the problem in our Democracy right now is the fact that while the existing power structures support the two party Republican/Democratic split, a fairly wide number of people self-identify with other political parties, from Greens and Socialists to Libertarians and the Freedom Party. They don't always vote for these candidates, however, because they understand that if they do, then their vote will simply not count, even if, by some miracle, they manage to wend their way through the roadblocks set up by the two parties and get a sufficient number of voters aware of their message.

So, yeah, I can vote in any primary I choose. In a presidential election, voting in a primary automatically enrolls you in the party you voted for, but in state primaries, it does not. So I can vote for any party here. Which means I gotta figure out who I'm gonna vote for...

(And for some reason, our primaries are on September 17th, a week after the date you left. Meaning I can sit scared in my cellar on the 10th - ha.)

So, yeah, I can vote in any primary I choose. In a presidential election, voting in a primary automatically enrolls you in the party you voted for, but in state primaries, it does not. So I can vote for any party here. Which means I gotta figure out who I'm gonna vote for...

(And for some reason, our primaries are on September 17th, a week after the date you left. Meaning I can sit scared in my cellar on the 10th - ha.)

Sometimes I've avoided voting for a candidate or a ballot initiative because of my ignorance of the issues. But it doesn't take full-time research to find out where most candidates stand. Your local governments probably put out an election guide, and that's a great place to start. Also, check your local deadtree newspapers in the weeks prior to an election. If you're not willing to subscribe, just go to a local library and ask a librarian if you need help. An hour in the periodicals room should give some insight into the issues and candidates.

For non-partisan info on the web see Project Vote Smart or The League of Women Voters. You may find links to local chapters here. And if you have an active local chapter, they almost certainly put out a voter's guide and may even sponsor debates.

If you want to surf some more, try starting with Google's Directory.

Finally, to follow the money check out Open Secrets.

Point taken. There are other good organizations for keeping one actually informed b'sides vote-smart.org. I saw a booklet given out by the League of Women Voters this summer 'round primary time, and I thought it was very helpful. I think they CAN be trusted as much as anyone can. More people using LWV as a resource would probably result in better informed voters.

As far as mailings go, I was primarily refering to candidate direct mailings, which is what most people 'round my parts receive. I don't think they can be trusted. The mainstream media can't be trusted because 1) politicians are more and more skilled at USING it and 2) they treat political contests like football games, not discussing policy, but rather the "score", political strategy, and occasional well-rehearsed soundbites.

LWV is great. Vote-smart.org is just another way to investigate a candidate. Their generalized issues test provides a way to see how their tendancies stack up to yours without rhetoric. Their campaign finance records can indicate to you whose interests they probably will represent. It's a tool, and there are others.

I see a similar issue here in academia. They shouldn't focus on commercial appplications because the market is good at that!! Instead, they should be focusing on studying what the VC's and commercial enterprises don't want to do but that would benefit the public good.

I don't the outcome of the commercialization trend is inevitable. Money is a means, not an end, and we can choose to value academia, education, democratic space, . But if we don't speak out, like Katz has done, and actively challenge this trend, it is certainly threatening much of the non-profit sector.

Michael Weiksner, founder of Quorum.org a politics forum w/open editorial control

The Leage of Women Voters was founded in 1920, to counter the assertion that if women were given the vote they were so ignorent they would only vote the ways their fathers and husbands told them to. It is a non-partisan organization dedicated to getting people involved in democracy. One big service they do is track candidate's records and statements of position.

Their unbiased reporting of this data is so respected here in MA, it's widely considered the standard. Usually before big elections the Boston Globe will run a special insert with one of their big position tables.

Frankly the problem is not getting good information on the candidates. It's the problem that the candidates suck.
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