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Comment by devmonk | Hacker News Reader

But we really need to go one step further and only vote on the issues and then hold candidates accountable for how well they addressed those issues. Otherwise, it remains as a popularity contest for liars.

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That's harder than it sounds. I started paying attention a little too late for the last election. With just a day to prepare, I couldn't figure out much about my local candidates or the issues. I only had their own bland and possibly false statements to go on, plus local newspaper endorsements. On almost all of the races I ended up throwing up my hands and voting Democrat because the Republicans have done more gay-bashing, Muslim-bashing, race-baiting, and sucking up to stupidity than the Democrats have. Plus the Democrats have been less aggressive about bashing all non-car-based transit. Those are are the only issues I can wrap my brain around and really care about. Pretty lame, huh?

I'm considering subscribing to my local paper just to get a daily reminder to pay attention to what's happening locally. Any other suggestions?

I had the same exact problem. And the lower level the position e.g., school board, the harder it was to find any position information. Some of the candidates didn't even show up in Google searches.

We actually made a site that helped people find what candidates were in their election PLUS showed how the incumbent performed on issues important to the user. Thus, if you choose a cause like pro-choice, the system shows you how other interest groups rate that politician on this issue. You can check out the voter guide on http://www.votereports.org

The big problem was getting candidate data. We're working on this for the next election but one key observation is that a lot of candidates are very vague about their positions as to remain unoffensive.

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