FootprintsintheWind.com

Footprints in the Wind^sm # 1467

Democracy is hard. For this election, I went on line looking for information about the candidates. I thought they would want people to know what they stood for, what their positions were on issues, what they proposed to do in office. This information was difficult to find. Their Websites did not provide much information; news channels sometimes asked them questions and sometimes they responded, but the space given them was a sentence or two.

So I started thinking: What if each candidate were required or strongly encouraged to provide this information each election? Perhaps to some election board or independent non partisan organization? And voters were encouraged to go there for information, maybe even have it as a place where people could carry on conversations about the issues in a civil manner?

And what if this site became the primary source for reliable information about the elections and candidates? And what if political ads were required to start with an inaudible electronic signal that would allow us to set our TVs to auto mute when a political ad came on?

It might give us all a little peace and quiet, and some more rationally considered voting.

Of course not everybody would look there to make their decisions; work needs to be done to make sure the site did not get hijacked; more work would be needed to make sure there was fairness.

Democracy might just get better, a little bit.

Please pass it on.

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