Safe from the Losing Fight

I know it’s a little late in the day, but here in the States it’s midterm election day. I think most polls are open until 7pm local time. So if you haven’t already gone and voted, you should seriously go do that right now.

Go on, I’ll wait.

… back already? Good.

One thing that I’m always frustrated about is the inability to find good, non-partisan information about the candidates. I found Project Smart Vote, which seems to be pretty good for the information it has. Unfortunately, I found that most of the candidates in my neck of the woods (Dallas, Texas area) didn’t respond to the questions. In the gubernatorial race, only one of the five candidates responded. It’s very hard to make a decision based on that.

How does everyone else find unbiased information about candidates? Surely no one votes a straight party ticket (although, scarily enough, that was an option on my ballot. Just check this one box to blindly follow the crowd!). In this day and age, you’d think such information would be easily available. After all, isn’t that the point of this here series of tubes called the internet? To quickly and easily disseminate information?

I attempted to read the websites for the gubernatorial candidates, but quickly lost my will to live. It was almost 100% spin, and pretty much no real content. I couldn’t easily surmise what their stance on anything was.

I would love to hear how other people solve this dilemma. Dart boards? Dice? Russian roulette?

In related news, I found that I voted for a disturbingly high number of Libertarian candidates. More than Democrats and even Republicans. Does that make me a bad person, or just a crazy person?

Found this while browsing Digg. It shows how many campaign contributions by zip code using google maps.

As for my area, can you tell what the dominant political party is? Can you say “Republicans”? I knew you could.

There are perks to living in the south.