Comments on: Apps for America: Snapvote

By: Sean Murphy

Sean Murphy — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 12:49:48 +0000

Despite the constraints you mention in the final paragraph, I think this has the potential to be a powerful tool for local elections and specific propositions. It would be most effective in cases where the defining positions of candidates on issues directly affecting a community are clear cut and there is less scope for skating around.

However, as one moves up to higher profile elections, the war rooms of the candidates become more sophisticated. For many politicians just sitting on the fence is a safe option. They seek to avoid commitment to divisive issues. Or better still, depending on his / her audience a politician would love to be able to claim to have voted for something but also against it. What mechanisms could SnapVote put in place to ensure candidates don’t end up confusing voters even further?

On the other hand, the service would be great for those independent candidates who update to pro user status. You could offer them a choice of landing pages based on where the clickthrough comes from. If the voter arrives via Ann Coulter they get to see the candidate posing Palin style with a dead moose and a few NRA animated gifs. If the user was referred by the NYT then well, you get the picture.. : )

By: zulusafari

zulusafari — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 07:14:17 +0000

WOW, Erik. I would go so far as to call this ‘idea’ beautiful. It’s a no brainer type project/proposal.

Here’s my one caveat. One person/entity has control over everyone’s profile. For every politician in the whole of the US. Complete control over the information for everyone. That’s a big job. Security of the site from hacking and changing info on politician’s profiles would be HUGE! A smaller issue (just a difficulty, no reason not to do it): default info that is completely ‘party-agnostic’ for every politician in the US would be a large task to pull together. As you said yourself, there’s a ton of them when you start pulling in every local race across the US (ie. school board votes).

By: changefeed (changefeed)

changefeed (changefeed) — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 05:55:02 +0000

->@WhiteAfrican: Apps for America: Snapvote http://tinyurl.com/a6syzp

By: Miquel

Miquel — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 02:36:02 +0000

It's such a good idea, I swear that someone has already done it or something like it, that's how good it is. The only sites I can think of like this are all preferential towards one party. It would be great to have a system that really just spewed out the facts so that you knew all these things. For instance, in San Francisco, we have an election every year. I have serious trouble keeping up! For those of us who are interested in things broader then the US (which I assume would be most of the readers here), it would be great to have something like this for world elections at large so that we know when to focus on a country. That way, when places like Ghana have normal, peaceful elections, they'll possibly get more coverage. Off the topic, but did you hear about the new buses in Cote d'Ivoire? I searched your archives here and on Afrigadget, but found no mention of them in the past. Of course my searching skills could very well suck. -miquel