Yesterday I began the process of preparing to vote for the fall election. Obviously, some decisions are very easy. But this year I also have to vote on whether to retain 3 state supreme court justices (not too hard a decision), on Circuit Court Judge, Grp. 45 (getting harder), a couple of County Court Judges, School board members and Soil and Water Conservation District Commissioners? (hummm). I probably spend about 5 hours on this preparation every election. I’m guessing many progressive leaning people don’t have the time. But these low visibility races are where our future leaders come from. And how can we expect to have quality schools and judicial decisions without making intelligent voting decisions?
My process is to search the web, and also glean information from progressive voter groups and mailings, LGBT voter guides, DailyKos diary’s, etc. Sometimes I reach a very clear decision. Often, however, I feel I have a very sketchy picture of the candidates, but use it as best I can to make a decision and move on. But in any case, the research I do benefits only me and my partner.
So, wouldn’t it be great to have a web based tool which lets you look up your address and gives you some crowd-sourced summary data on the candidates or propositions, and add your own discoveries where they would add value?
First, we’d need a framework that lets people look up their district and find the races in it. The look-up could be something like what my county uses: https://www.browardsoe.org/... . Try “2020 Wilton DR” just for an example address. Then click on “My Current Elections” and then “2012 General Election”. Although this is only for one county in one state, and the information they actually display on each candidate is pretty worthless, this is a pretty cool thing to have and I congratulate the Broward County Supervisor of Elections for having this for several years now!
Now suppose we allowed users who have some sort of crude screening process (like perhaps a Daily Kos membership) to contribute information on races on which they had information. Perhaps there could be a crowd-sourced way of voting on a “contributor’s” “credibility” (and perhaps this could be augmented by their “mojo” score and stored in their DK profile).
Perhaps a contributor could post a candidate’s “progressive score”, plus a “confidence rating” in that score, and then maybe some text and/or links to articles about what they’ve found. The tool would calculate the scores, taking into account the contributor and confidence ratings, and make the information viewable. We could leverage the DK diary (and comment) capability for more in depth discussions, although a simple table of “contributor”, “contributor credibility”, “Progressive Score”, “Confidence rating” and limited length comment might be best.
I’m thinking that there are probably individuals who are very knowledgeable about education issues and might be willing to add info about school board candidates. Someone else might know about judges, or some judges. Perhaps organizations who already do progressive voter guides would help populate their info, in return for links to their more in depth evaluations. And if those sources aren’t available, there’s always some of the “low confidence” data that people like me glean from looking at various articles on the web (which I would mark with a “low confidence” rating so that it could be overridden by someone who has more information.)
So, what would we need to do this? For starters a database, and ideally a well-recognized progressive place to make it available, like Daily Kos (although obviously it could be elsewhere). And then we need a way to build the relationship between addresses and precincts, and precincts and races. I have no idea how to do that, other than maybe some information might be available from election sources like the Broward County Supervisor of Elections. It’s undoubtedly very complicated to do, and different for each state. Wikipedia has some information about districts, but not sure how easy it is to correlate with actual addresses and I think it's mostly at the congressional and state representative level. I really don’t know how to get down to the precinct level. Perhaps there could be some “super-trusted” contributors who could help set this up, and maybe we start with limited coverage and build on it.
There would have to be different ways to access this database to view and add information: by voter address, and by the various districts that determine where the races are run (US-wide, State, County, City, School board boundaries, judicial districts, etc. And of course to identify which precincts are associated with what other races. Yuck!
I don’t know how much abuse a tool like this might attract. If it were to become popular, then the benefits of “gaming it” would obviously increase. That doesn’t sound impossible to handle, although it does seem like it gets harder to police the more low-level the races are.
I can’t imagine I’m the first one to think of something like this. Is there anything already out there like this? Is this something that people think would be helpful? I’d be willing to contribute to it.
I think it’s really important that we give people the ability to vote progressively, without devoting undue amounts of their time. The next elections after November will be “minor” ones, with lots of candidates that even some of us who “think we’re informed” have never heard of. Many of us want to do the right thing, if we could lower their investment in doing so.