Three Weeks To Go: Get Informed, America!

This little ditty has been making its way across the interwebs recently:

Entrepreneurial prodigy Ben Casnocha disagreed with the tone of this video, offering his own “better” advice:

If you read up on the issues, please vote in November. If you aren’t informed, please voluntarily step away from the voting booth and keep your hands where we can see them!

In a more recent post, he adds an example from the Howard Stern show for emphasis (clip here: Listen to this MP3 clip):

A guy goes to Harlem and asks people who they’re voting for. All three say Obama. He then attributes McCain’s views to Obama and asks whether they agree with it. For example, “Do you agree with Obama’s pick of Sarah Palin? Do you agree with Obama that our troops should stay in Iraq? Do you agree with Obama that stem cell research should be banned?” To all, they say yes.

I’m not going to get into this, but welcome your thoughts in the comments (Ashish, I’m looking at you).  Seeing, though, as I do agree that the most informed voter is the best voter, I wanted to offer some help.

Wayyyyy back in January, I put together a post reviewing some web sites that seek to help voters make an informed choice in three weeks.  TechCrunch recently reminded me about one of those tools: Glassbooth.  From my January post:

GlassBooth’s name reflects both its commitment to transparent, non-partisan balance and the stripped-down, Google-y appearance of its site.  This site heavily promotes its quiz, which is innovative in that it measures the value that the user attaches to the issues before generating a set of questions asking his or her position on those issues. GlassBooth also features a page that lets you drill down into the candidates’ positions on different issues via voting records, proposed and passed legislation, quotes, and video clips.

Obviously, one should not base one’s vote for president based on a twenty-question quiz.  The quiz is merely a starting point for further research. Especially now that the parties have pared down the candidates to their official nominees, Glassbooth has shifted its focus from breadth to depth.  For each nominee, Glassbooth has dived deep into the quotes, the clips, the votes, the proposed legislation, the survey responses, and the published platforms.  They’ve expanded to new subject areas, like Science and the Internet.  And they’re keeping track of new information from the candidates, monitoring any nuances, shifts, or contradictions in position.

I recommend Glassbooth as an excellent source of information as you cast your ballots.  But while I’ve found Glassbooth to be the most useful (and least partisan), I would be remiss if I didn’t mention at least two other offerings.

The first is Political Base (which I also covered in my January post).  I find it a bit too noisy for my taste, but it offers lots of user-generated and editorial content for your consumption.  They offer their own quiz, but I must say that I found the questions to be pretty blatantly slanted to the left.  It also keeps track of polls, and positions itself more as a real-time, well, base for election information rather than a balanced resource (Glassbooth is run by a non-partisan non-profit; Political Base is working on a business model).  Each has their strengths and weaknesses.

And of course that little start-up in Mountain View that I work for has its own resources to offer. :) [warning: shamless plug ahead].  Start your political fact-finding journey at Google’s 2008 U.S. Election site!  We’ve got news, quotes, videos, maps, online debates, and more!  But no quizzes. :(