Hacker News Reader

Comment by samstave | Hacker News Reader

We need a TV channel/website that simply states the facts of the positions each politician holds, where they are from, when their elections are coming up and their voting record based on their supposed stance.

There are SO many things that we can do.

We invest supposedly in physical and technical infra, but never in political....

THAT is the revolution I want to see.

View on HN

Every campaign website I have ever seen clearly explains the candidates position on all relevant issues. If you are looking for third party sources, you can also see the information compiled be VoteSmart.org and OnTheIssues.org.

Your state's Secretary of State office will list upcoming elections, and BallotPedia.org collects many of these.

The resources are already out there and available. It says something that you didn't even know that though.

Thank you, let me amend my statement and we just need to better educate people on where to find this info.

Some of the struggle is due to silly arcana. For example, the local deadline for submitting candidate statements is immediately after filing week, but before endorsements can be known. So crucial signals voters rely on are often missing.

The only fix is to keep pushing for improvements. Explain the problems to the gatekeepers, lobby for change.

> We need a TV channel/website that simply states the facts of the positions each politician holds

Even the politicians themselves don't portray this consistently, so the "facts" of that are often subject to doubt.

If you want to watch the sausage being made in real-time, there are a couple of channels of C-SPAN.

Oregon has this, but not on television. There's a voter information book that's mailed to anyone who has a mailbox, a couple weeks before ballots go out. It contains non-partisan descriptions of issues, candidate-provided statements, and arguments for/against with a verified source for each. IIRC anyone can pay some small amount of money to have a position/argument included.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com