Politics on the Web
The past election was the most web aware election ever. It seems that every candidate and every party has its own web site. Most of the candidate sites are shallow, uninformative, and filled with clichés and propaganda. Fortunately there are a number of non-partisan sites designed to provide voters with useful information. In fact there are more such sites than most people have time to peruse. Some, however are unusually useful. Addresses and a short summary of the most useful sites are given below, listed in approximate order of usefulness.
Project Vote Smart - www.vote-smart.org
This non-partisan organization has perhaps the best election related site on the Internet. Funded by individuals and foundations, it has worked long and hard to bring useful election related information to the votes. It has extensive information on almost all national and state candidates. For each candidate it presents five categories of information:
Another useful feature is a page which allows you to find your state legislative district by putting your address into a web form.
It also has educational materials on elections, government, issues, and politics as well as thousands of links.
The only difficulty is that the site is so popular that sometimes its server is overloaded so that the response time is a bit slow.
League of Women Voters - New Mexico - www.lwvnm.org
This non- partisan organization, supported by membership dues and some local educational grants, has a site particularly useful to New Mexican voters. It includes a copy of the NM Constitution.
Center for Responsive Politics - www.crp.org
This non-partisan organization, sponsored by foundation grants, specializes in tracking the money given to candidates. It does a VERY good job of letting you find out from where the enormous sums of money given to candidates comes. The data is presented in well designed and informative graphs.
Web, White, and Blue - www.webwhiteblue.org
This non-partisan web site is sponsored by the Markle Foundation and is designed for the recent national election. It contains information of general interest and appears to have close ties with many national news organizations. It also has links to many other political sites and appears to be a bit uncertain as to its future direction.
Democracy Network - www.dnet.org
This site was developed by the Center for Governmental Studies and highlights a different national issue each week.
Common Cause http://www.commoncause.org
The national Common Cause web site.
Congressional Quarterly - www.cq.com
Detailed news reports of the activities of congress. Objective and more than quarterly too.
Last update 16 Jan 2008 03:59