There was an election today for state senate and some judges where I live. Most people didn’t vote; I almost didn’t either except that I saw a tweet from the mayor telling me about it. As it happened I knew about a state senate candidate I supported because a friend had told me about her, so I went to vote. There were a couple of local judge positions where I didn’t know who to vote for, so I picked randomly. Afterwards, I thought how ironic it is that the elections we’re most likely to vote in (president, Senate and House of Representatives) are also the ones where our vote is least likely to matter. In small local elections for positions like state legislature, city councillor, civil court judge and so on the vote count can be in the thousands or even less, and small number of votes really count.
But it’s not so easy. It’s easy enough to get out and vote, but if you don’t know who you’re voting for it doesn’t do much good. Yes, with a little more research I could have found out about the civil court judge positions I got to vote for, who was running and what their positions are. But it would take awhile even to figure out what the races were; I know because I did try to look before I went. And I only knew about the person I voted for because a person I trusted told me about her. I assume the candidates did their best to get their name and positions out, but they were facing an overwhelming flood of competing news. I’m sure the newspaper must have mentioned them at some point, but in spite of my reading the news all the time I never saw it.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. All this information is publicly available, just not very well aggregated. Some websites are working hard to do this. The best one I found is BallotPedia, which has a pretty good collection of what’s going on, including a list of the state senators. It even has a place where you can enter your address and see a sample ballot – but only for the general election. With enough searching I could still have figured out who was running today, but not quickly.
But there is no reason a website couldn’t allow you to put in your address and tell exactly who is running for what that you can vote for, what day the election is happening, where your polling place is, links to all the candidates’ web pages and news stories about them and information about their voting record if they are in office. You could also register to get emails to inform you about various off-season elections, such as for bond issues.
There may be no profit motive for a private company to do this and it might be too difficult for a nonprofit, but it’s something the US government could set up very easily, for an amount that would be a pittance by US government standards (five or ten million dollars a year would be more than enough).
The best part is it’s not something that has to be done nationally right away. Small groups could do local or state versions of the same thing. It could be an advanced student project or college level programming project. You could start as small as you want. If it worked in smaller areas it could be expanded and get bigger and bigger until it covered the whole country. Imagine if countless small organizations began, and started to come together to makes something bigger.