Ramble

Are you feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of Presidential candidates this election season? Did you ever wish there was some way that you could figure out who you should vote for? Well, you could read newspapers, candidate position papers, check out political websites, and you know, be an active participant in the democratic system. But, this is the era of Web 2.0! We don’t need to think for ourselves anymore. Now, there is a better way. Simply fill out this quick quiz at Glassbooth and find out who you should vote for in a matter of minutes!

Here are my results:

Okay, I’m being a bit facetious. I actually applaud the effort to leverage technology to connect people with a political system that seems designed to grind the optimism right out of us on a daily basis. I, too, am interested in how technology can help us tackle the myriad problems we face as a democractic society. I just hope people don’t take these quizes too seriously. They are a nice shorthand method of finding candidates who share your general point of view, but they should only be used as a starting point for further investigation, not as the definitive answer of who to vote for.

The Glassbooth site helps in this regard by offering more than just another political quiz. At the end of the quiz, you are presented with “find out why” links for each of the issues that you rated in the beginning. On these pages, you find cited quotes from the top candidate that provide evidence for why he was rated as he was on your quiz.

The Glassbooth Blog is also worth a look as it provides insight into the how and why of the site. The creators are certainly not political flacks. There was a lot of good research and many late nights devoted to creating a tool that hopes to help people cut through the horse race nonesense and general muck of much political reporting to the heart of the matter, what do these candidates stand for? It is a noble experiment and I hope they succeed. In the future, it seems that the creators will be offering some more direct access to the trove of data they gathered that make up the backend of the quiz software. Once that data is available, I think the site will become much more useful. For now, a person who is very busy and doesn’t have a lot of time to research candidates themselves can find an effective shortcut in this site.

However, while voting and voting wisely is vitally important, real democracy demands much more of us. While sites like Glassbooth are very useful, they do not address the urgent need we have in this country for people to take direct action beyond the voting booth. Organizations and sites like MoveOn.org and Step It Up help connect people together in direct action movements trying to address grave threats to our society that go well beyond who sits in the big chair in the Oval Office.

So, after you have figured out which candidate to vote for at Glassbooth, I hope you’ll take some time to explore the variety of ways you can get involved in more direct action to make a real difference in the world, whether or not it is a Presidential election season.