Monday, May 15, 2006

Election Day

Well, tomorrow is election day. How many of you knew that? I almost forgot myself and I actually care. Our media, and I'm talking TV, newspapers, radio (and not just news) does a very, very poor job of promiting the fact that we can vote tomorrow.

Now, as you know as a primary with district seats, where you live and your party will determine who your choices are. I dare you to find a good city website that will give you a listing of the candidates, or a sample ballot for your actual polling place, or better yet a city website that will tell you where your polling place is!

I've looked. Comittee of Seventy was my best guess and they failed me. The city website? Do any of you know what the address is? phila.gov? nope.. careful.. it's actually www.phila.gov.. how hard to do some DNS work and get that working right? Doesn't matter.. if you get there, there's nothing obvious about the upcoming election.

There's nothing, and that's a shame. I think they want it that way so they can stay in power. So it's up to us to bust our buts and do research on who is actually running and then find out what we can about them all by our lonesomes.. shameful!!!

2 comments:

Ryan said...

I smell a challenge! First of all, Seventy has a whole section devoted to the election (http://www.seventy.org/electioninfo/index.html). The list of candidates is here: http://www.seventy.org/electioninfo/upcoming.html, but you can use the tabs on the left side of the screen to navigate more information about the elections.

You can find your polling place on their site by going here: http://www.seventy.org/maps/index.html.

There are also links there for provisional and absentee ballots, but having such a small staff doesn't enable them to PDF all the sample ballots (b/c they differ by ward!) for each election. I think you can contact City Hall and get a copy though - we used to get sample ballot copies from them to give to our volunteers during their training session.

Unknown said...

Thanks Ry. I actually found most of the stuff you are referring to. But I found the seventy site lacking and dated. I know they have a small staff and I don't fault them for that. In my mind the city should be posting this stuff somewhere and not depending on 3rd parties.

For instance I've been looking for turnout percentages for Tuesday and I can't find anything anywhere. I suspect that this election was one of the lowest turnout elections in history and I want to proove that but I think the only way to do that is to go to city hall in person and demand the info I need. That's just not cool in my book.