Politics

I've been researching who to vote for on November 4th, no not the president, my local representatives. In the past, I've felt like an ignorant monkey showing up at the poles, reading the ballot, and wondering who the heck these people are. I am ashamed to say I would vote by using such arbitrary rulers as their name sounding more pleasant than their opponents, or something equally dreadful. Not this year though! I decided to become proactive and see if I could find any information about who would be on the ballot and track them down to see what their platform was and really try to pick who I thought would be the best for the job....unfortunately I am finding out that it's harder than I anticipated.

I started out fine, after some frustration with my smart phone, I was able to go to my county's website and download an example ballot for the general election. (I had to wait to get to a desktop computer as the website wouldn't work on my palm treo.) I also found that most -- if not all -- of the state and national campaigns had web pages that were listed with the candidates contact information...no, the problem was with the Local elections, the running for legislative district representatives, sheriff, and county board members. There is almost literally nothing I could find online for any of them. I spent a good 3 hours on Google trying different searches to see if I could get anybody to tell me about who these people were. I tried youtube, facebook, wikipedia and others, but it was mostly all in vain. Oh, I found a morsel here, a crumb there but not what I was expecting.

I did find one shining star in all the empty space however. A friend and coleague of mine Roland Smith recently retired and is trying to inform Southeastern Idaho about political matters. He has a blog at http://www.rnsmith.com/ and he's also created another website http://www.seidahovotes.com/ that have some good information on them. I was also able to email Roland and get his take on many of the candidates. He had some good insites and anecdotes from meeting these people at luncheons and events. I'm not going to take his opinions and just run with them, but after our email discussion I feel a lot more confident in understanding the lay of the land around here.