Saturday, October 13, 2012

Informed voting

I was pretty impressed with the thoroughness of the website, isidewith.com, for their coverage of many different issues that are often important to voters in the US.

I was surprised to see that I am nearly evenly split between agreement with Barack Obama and Jill Stein. I still haven't decided how I'm going to vote, though.




In the two-party system we seem to support here in the US, I feel like choosing someone other than Obama or Romney is basically throwing my vote away. However, perhaps it is because everyone feels like this that the two-party system persists. I'm sure it is a little more complicated than that (e.g. funding behind the two major party candidates, voters having the time to investigate all candidates, candidates being able to get on the ballots in every state, etc...).

The website, above, however, was very useful, in my opinion, for giving me a starting point to learn about the ways the candidates differ on a variety of topics. I would like to take this quiz a few times to see how consistent my results are, but I'm not sure I'll be that motivated. I did take it twice. The first time, I agreed with Jill Stein on something just above 90%, and she was my top hit, but then I accidentally closed the browser. The image from above was taken from the summary of results a few days later. 

But, rather than test out their quiz, I think I'll spend the time reading up on all the propositions here in California. We got our mail-in ballots yesterday (yay!), and they need to be returned as soon as possible. 

Happy voting!

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