Five Ways to Rock the Vote
dan tynan on Aug 12 2008 at 5:10 pm | Filed under: Da Web, PC World, Web 2.0
Don’t like the government? Go out and make one of your own. These five Web sites can help you get informed, get active, and get those jokers out of office.
(A version of this story first appeared on PCworld.com.)
In case you haven’t noticed, it’s an election year. Along with making promises, shaking hands, and kissing babies, candidates and their supporters are leaning heavily on Web 2.0 sites to deliver their message.
But they’re not the only ones. There are scores of political action sites that help you get up to speed on laws and legislation, see how elected officials are spending your money, argue with fellow citizens on issues of import – even make and broadcast your own political ads – without leaning too hard to the left or the right.
It was either Alexis de Tocqueville or Hunter S. Thompson who said that, in a democracy, people generally get the kind of government they deserve. Here are five ways to get your just desserts.
1. Govit.com
Why wait until the second Tuesday in November to vote? At Govit.com, you can weigh in on pending legislation, post comments, then compare your votes to other Govit users and your elected representatives. After you vote on, say, closing Guantanamo Bay or opening the continental shelf to oil drilling, you can submit your choice along with a brief note to your local Congressperson, U.S. Senator, or the president.
The site also features a handy map to each Congressional district and the executive branch. (Quick, who’s Secretary of the Department of the Interior? Give yourself five points if you came up with Dirk Kempthorne.) You can drill down into each member’s voting record on every bill and follow the money trail of their biggest campaign contributors. Though technically nonpartisan, a quick scan of the site shows that its audience tends to skew liberal on most issues. (Of course, that could change at any minute.) The beta site was also a bit slow to respond; much like Congress itself.
2. Change-Congress.org
Launched by Stanford law professor Lawrence Lessig and Internet campaign guru Joe Trippi, Change Congress has one explicit goal: To change how money influences our nation’s political process. The wiki is built around a four-point pledge: To get a full four-star rating, candidates or office holders must vow to accept contributions only from individuals, not committees or lobbyists; to banish earmarks from legislation that act as paybacks to large donors; to reveal who they’re meeting with and where their money comes from; and to support public campaign financing.
A handy map on the home page displays how much money each politico receives from Political Action Committees (PACs). You can find out which of these positions (if any) a candidate or representative supports by plugging in your ZIP code. If there’s no information available, you can add it along with the source for the information (like a Web site). Site admins will verify or correct this data later.
Though nominally a wiki, Change Congress isn’t very interactive; so far, all you can do is add information about what positions candidates have taken on the four-point pledge. And it’s also still a long way from being comprehensive. But the biggest changes always start with small steps.
3. SaysMe.tv
You say you’ve always secretly yearned to be a political media strategist? Here’s your chance. At SaysMe.tv you can select a pre-fab 30-second political ad and run it on nearly any TV channel. (At press time SaysMe was available in nine US cities; by year end it plans to sell time in 82 cable markets nationwide.) You can choose from a few dozen ads promoting issues on either side of the political stripe, with new ones added each week. Then pick the market and channel where you want it to run and how many times it should appear. Best of all, each ad ends with “Paid for by yourname.”
Of course, air time is almost never free. A single airing starts at $5 for CNBC in Cleveland and reaches $500 for ESPN in New York City. But you can also submit your own broadcast-quality political spots that others can use – and collect royalties every time someone else airs them.
4. WhereIstand.com
Wanna fight? WhereIstand is the place to take a stand on any number of hot-button issues, from global warming to the existence of God to whether fat people should pay more for their airline tickets.
It’s really more like a social network that’s built around opinions, the way Flickr is built around sharing photos or Facebook is built around throwing sheep. You create a profile, post a photo, pick the opinions or issues you want to follow, and then connect with like-minded people and chat them up. Any member can post a Yes or No question on any topic, and anyone else can vote and append their comments to each discussion. You can then compare your opinions to other WhereIstand members or those of public figures, compiled by the site’s administrators. Though WhereIstand’s topics run the gamut, the best arguments focus on politics — in a way that doesn’t involve one person screaming at another. That’s something you don’t often see in an election year.
5. Project Vote Smart
The grand daddy of political action sites, Project Vote Smart calls itself the “Voters’ Self-Defense System.” Its primary weapon: information. The resolutely non-partisan site offers one-stop shopping for researching every aspect of a politico’s public life.
For example, you can see how your state and federal officials fared on the Political Courage Test, an in-depth questionnaire that takes their temperature on key issues from abortion to welfare (or notes when the cowards declined to fill one out). You can look up how they voted on each bill, search the text of every public speech, see how they were rated by interest groups like the League of Conservation Voters or the NRA, and follow the money trail. You can find out how and where to register to vote in your state, and get guides to every creature in the political food chain – from political parties and media to think tanks and polling organizations. Don’t visit a polling booth without it.
