Voting
My wife and I did our civic duty and voted in the primary this morning. I was going to be all cute and put the "I voted (and am more patriotic than you)" sticker in my entry, but it didn't scan very well and I couldn't find a digital copy of it doing a google search. Oh, well.
One thing that surprised me while I was trying to figure out who to vote for was how difficult it was to find out what many of the candidates stood for. The only ones I had heard radio spots for were the sitting judges and Jane Brooks and I watch very little TV, so I was hoping to find info about the candidates online.
But finding that information proved to be much more problematic than I originally thought. In the end, Our Campaigns proved to be somewhat helpful, but there were a good number of candidates that I still have no idea who they are or what they stand for. For the race for the circuit court judges, for example, I simply voted for the incumbents.
Putting up a simple campaign site these days just isn't that difficult. Get a simple blog at blogger or right here at BaltiBlogs and you'll have most of the design work done for you. Or, fork over the $20/mo for a few months and get your own domain and basic web hosting. If Ray Bly can have a site, anyone can.
Granted, not everyone is Internet-savvy, but it seems that enough party operatives would be aware of the uses of the Internet to give the candidates a heads-up. The Internet's strength is that information distribution is incredibly cheap, so a candidate can actually take the time to spell out the whats and whys of his or her positions. Using that can be a great aid for democracy.
March 2, 2004 11:21 AMLike Elliott Cahan!
Pondered by Greg at March 2, 2004 11:45 AMI was thinking of Cahan's site when writing the post. If I was in the city limits, I would have probably voted for him solely on the grounds of good communication with potential voters.
Pondered by maphet at March 2, 2004 11:53 AM