INFORMATION UNDER-LOAD
Today is of course a very significant day in the course of history, regardless of your party affiliation, and
whether or not you're a citizen of the United States.
It's Election Day in the U.S. of course, and as many as a 135 million Americans are expected to line up around the country to vote, out of a population of 300 million*.
And of course, if you do have an opportunity to vote, do not let this opportunity pass you by.
Most of you of course already plan to do so, and have been actively preparing to figure out who you're going to vote for today.
The Presidential candidates themselves have spent close to a billion dollars to get their message out to the electorate.
Additionally, dozens of candidates running for national office in the House and Senate, have spent several hundred billion dollars to get their message out as well.
And let's not forget the hundreds of candidates around the country running for State and local offices that have likewise raised and spent millions of dollars trying to acquaint potential voters with themselves and what they aspire to do if given the opportunity.
Most of that money of course was spent on superficial, incessant, negative campaigning, with generally inaccurate information, that unfortunately seems to be the primary way candidates can still break through the clutter for our attention and votes.
There of course has been a ton of noise, and very little signal. Ironically we have long had a situation of "Water, Water Everywhere, and not a drop to drink".
As my wife and I prepared for our vote today, it struck us how difficult it was to pull together information on the various State and local choices we were going to have to make on the ballot today.
It took the better part of five hours of concentrated effort on the web, to pull together the names, backgrounds, positions and other relevant information on the half a dozen additional State and local elections we needed to be prepared for to vote at the ballot this morning.
And we didn't even have to prepare for the additional choices that voters have to make in other states like California, on various ballot propositions and initiatives.
Of course I realize that this state of affairs is just "Good Politics" for a lot of State and local politicians. A lot of the folks who have a hand in setting up the way State and local elections work benefit from a process that's utterly opaque, inefficient, and as diffused as possible. Lot of markets for the longest time are kept as lacking in transparency for as long as possible, for the benefit of the incumbents running the show. The losers of course are the market participants.
So the obvious observation here is that there needs to be a better way for mainstream folks to access this stuff on the "less prominent" elections and initiatives.
Even using mainstream services like Google and Yahoo!, the task seemed to entail a lot more effort than one would imagine, especially with all the inexpensive and "efficient" technologies at our finger tips today.
Hopefully we'll make progress on this front by 2008 and beyond.
Until then, let's slog it out, do our homework, and get as prepared as we can not just for the election choices on top of the ballot, but the rest of the ballot as well.
Happy Voting.
*Image source.
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