For those who need help figuring out who to vote for - or your friends who do

[csziggy]

http://www.voteeasy.org/

My sister sent me a link to this site. You select your state or enter your zip code, and it will put up the candidates running in your area. If you click on a candidate, it will put up their responses, either actual or inferred (where possible), to questions important to most voters. Or instead, you can click on an issue at the top, answer the question as to how you believe and it will rank the candidates according to how close they are to your response.

Aside from the cute graphics - the candidates are depicted as yard signs - this is a simple and easy way to see who best fits with your views. Or to see who has absolutely no public record so their views can be determined for real rather than taking them at their word.

[Coyote_Bandit]

1. I wouldn't recommend it

I tried it just to see what it would recommend for my state Senate race. It recommended I vote for an independent candidate I've never heard of. So I looked a little closer. According to the site making the recommendation, the candidate's position is unknown on all but one of the issues - where they have inferred a position. So the site recommended that I vote for a candidate they basically know nothing about.

http://www.voteeasy.org/#/state=ok&district=1&candidate=106410


FWIW, the Dem candidate in this election fares no better. The site knows nothing about his position on any of the 12 issues.

http://www.voteeasy.org/#/state=ok&district=1&candidate=45931

[csziggy]

4. A lot of the independent/no party affiliation have no record to evaluate

And many of them in the races in my area have not given interviews, have not had public events, have not been in any debates - think Alvin Green. So the inferred answers are better than anything I could, as an individual, find about them.

For the major party candidates, they seem reasonably accurate for the races in my area.

[Coyote_Bandit]

5. The site knows nothing about the position of the Dem candidate

in the same election. Nothing regarding any of the 12 issues. It can at least infer a position on one issue for one of the independent candidates.

These kinds of sites are only as good as the information they have regarding the position of the candidates. Unfortunately, not all people look to see just what those vote recommendations are based on.

This site told me that my views were similar to those of a particular independent candidate when its knowledge regarding that candidate was limited to inferring a single position on a single issue. I call bullshit on that. No fucking way that site could show that the candidate had similar views as mine. We could have absolutely disagreed on the remaining 11 issues! I might just as well have chosen who to vote for based on a host of other meaningless information.

With respect to the race I looked at this site is absolutely worthless. It doesn't even have basic biographical information on one independnet candidate.

Sorry I can't recommend that lazy voters surrender their voting decisions to a website - particularly a poorly informed one.

[City Lights]

2. Interesting...

I matched most closely with the Green Party candidates for the House and Senate in 11 out of 12 categories. I had one three-way tie between the D/G/R Senate candidates for one category, and one tie between the D/G House candidates for one category.

FYI, they frequently rely on "inferred" answers from candidates to do their matching.

[lonestarnot]

3. No one needs to tell me for whom I should vote.

:crazy: