[HN Gopher] Show HN: OpenBallot, Aggregated SF/California Voter ...
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Show HN: OpenBallot, Aggregated SF/California Voter Guides
Author : daisystanton
Score : 29 points
Date : 2024-10-29 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.openballot.app)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.openballot.app)
| daisystanton wrote:
| A group of us (democracy-passionate friends) just launched
| OpenBallot, a platform of 40+ voter guides. The goal is to save
| you research time by showing you all the endorsements and
| explanations you care about in one place. You can use this to
| fill out your ballot, which is private by default. You can then
| share with friends or publish your views on our platform.
|
| The site is our first prototype; if you're in SF, please try it
| and share your feedback! We're hoping to use this to eventually
| scale to all over the country.
| culi wrote:
| How can people contribute new guides?
|
| I've thought about doing basically this exact project a number
| of times. The biggest thing I'd wanna change is to not focus on
| the guides so much. Lots of organizations are shy about making
| an endorsement so guides can often be pretty barebones. A much
| more useful view, imo, would be to allow users to select a
| number of voter guides, and then view a full ballot. With
| badges by the choices endorsed by whatever guides they have
| activated
| daisystanton wrote:
| Yeah, that's what we do! Try logging in and following your
| favorite guides; from there you'll see your "ballot view"
| that (I think) describes exactly what you're after? More
| whitespace than I'd like (compact view or die!), but I was
| outnumbered ;-)
|
| Two options to contribute new guides: 1) Tweet
| https://x.com/OpenBallotApp with the guide URL, or 2) join
| our Discord and post in #guides-wishlist:
| https://discord.gg/mzubN2v4
|
| We'd love to hear from you!
| slg wrote:
| >Lots of organizations are shy about making an endorsement so
| guides can often be pretty barebones.
|
| Then that's a bad voter guide. A voter guide should be about
| offering context and not just a binary cheat sheet of
| endorse/not endorse, yes/no, red/blue, etc.
|
| A good guide should explain the issues (from the specific
| perspective of the group preparing the guide) regardless of
| the ultimate suggestion. The primary guide I used (for LA not
| SF) was over 60 pages to explain their perspective and
| reasoning on everything. It also used language like
| "enthusiastically endorse", "endorse", "strongly recommend",
| "recommend", and "no recommendation" to give degrees to their
| suggestions.
|
| I would personally ignore any of the guides on OpenBallot
| which provide no explanation for their votes. It might even
| be a good idea for OpenBallot to require explanations. What
| value is someone's recommendation if they can't tell you why
| that is their recommendation?
| daisystanton wrote:
| These are great suggestions; thank you!
| orionsbelt wrote:
| Care to share the LA guide?
| slg wrote:
| I'm happy to share it, but I'll admit I didn't include
| the name in my original comment because the source will
| get some people riled up. I was referring to the guide
| from LA's chapter of the Democratic Socialists of
| America.[1] I think it stands up as an example of an
| extremely well put together guide regardless of your
| political affiliation.
|
| As a progressive person, I used a combination of that and
| The Knock LA's voter guide[2] to get the progressive
| perspective and then I combined that with Ballotpedia[3]
| to get a non-partisan view, see more mainstream
| endorsements, and campaign finance details (California
| often has too many confusing ballot measures, so when in
| doubt looking at who paid how much to support a
| proposition is my usual tiebreaker).
|
| [1] - https://dsa-la.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/DSA-
| LA-2024-Ge...
|
| [2] - https://knock-la.com/the-knock-la-progressive-
| voter-guide-fo...
|
| [3] - https://ballotpedia.org/California_elections,_2024
| blululu wrote:
| This is really cool and I appreciate the concept. I was pleased
| to see a friend's voter guide listed however I was sad to see
| that the opinions that he had thoughtfully articulated in the
| email version of his guide are not present here. This is really
| a loss since he had provided good reasons. If I am being
| honest, this tool is only helpful if it offers detailed
| justifications for every position.
| daveeyb wrote:
| So cool!
| mettler wrote:
| Awesome!
|
| And everyone make sure you're registered to vote:
| https://vote.gov/
| quercusa wrote:
| Nice idea. Oregon has fantastic voter pamphlets with candidate-
| supplied bios, as well as for/against ads that people can buy.
|
| Sample: https://www.washingtoncountyor.gov/elections/current-
| voters-...
| bix6 wrote:
| Super neat!
|
| A count at the top of each item would be cool (ie quick glance
| see counts of yes / no, maybe shaded by party affiliation?)
|
| On mobile I wouldn't miss follow profile / like comment, at least
| as a casual user when scrolling through a prop.
| blululu wrote:
| I think that a tally of endorsements or partisan affiliation is
| counter productive. That is just a bias toward whichever side
| had the most interest groups pushing an agenda. Democracy works
| best when people think for themselves. We defer to the majority
| opinion after all the votes are tallied and not before.
| SllX wrote:
| The best aggregator is the rubbish bin. I've been pulling this
| trash off the front of my gate for a while and it just now
| occurred to me I should start invoicing the responsible parties
| for the disposal charges and referring them to the City for
| littering.
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