Issue date: October 14, 1998
As candidates and public interest organizations scramble to get their message out on the Internet, the League of Women Voters has a new angle: Your personal ballot.
Log on to www.smartvoter.org, and near the top of the home page is a box where you can type in your address. Hit return, and -- presto -- the computer shows your personal ballot, with everything on it from governor and senator, to city council, the San Mateo County Harbor District, ballot measures, and even judges. It also shows your polling place -- which can be really helpful if you lose your sample ballot.
You can easily get basic information about candidates, including position papers, top priorities and endorsements. You can also link to other web sites with election information.
Kathleen Weisenberg of Atherton, one of the leaders in setting up the league's "Smart Voter" project in 1996, hopes it will help alleviate the problem of campaign finances. "This is free to the voter and free to the candidates," she said.
Smart Voter is an outgrowth of a study by the national League of Women Voters that identified new technology as one means of making voter information more accessible to citizens. As a resident of Silicon Valley, Mrs. Weisenberg, who was serving on the national board, helped contact Smart Valley Inc. in 1996, which was busy wiring Silicon Valley for the next century.
In May of that year they called former Senator Becky Morgan, chief of Joint Venture Silicon Valley, and Pete Sinclair of Woodside, who headed Smart Valley. "By September we were on line in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties," Mrs. Weisenberg said.
This election, Smart Voter is reaching 13 counties in California, plus four cities in other states: Tucson, Arizona; Nashville, Tennessee; Cincinnati, Ohio; and Snohomish, Washington.
Smart Voter is governed by the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund through a steering committee which includes Mrs. Weisenberg. It is co-sponsored by Smart Valley, the California Secretary of State, the California Voter Foundation, and registrars of voters in participating counties.
"The Smart Voter project isn't just another experiment conducted in cyberspace," said Warren Slocum, San Mateo County's registrar of voters. "It's about creating a next-generation model for electronic citizenship."
"By the year 2000 we'd like to be everywhere -- on-line in every California county," said Mrs. Weisenberg. "It was born here. It is taking off."
Mrs. Weisenberg can be reached at 323-7146.
Other sites
Among other information, its web site, www.vote-smart.org, gives candidates' responses to complex questions on subjects ranging from guns and abortion to taxes and welfare. It also shows voting records, campaign finances, and evaluations of more than 13,000 candidates nationally. The site appears as a link from the Smart Voter web site.
Libraries are giving out free copies of Project Vote Smart's "Voter's Self Defense Guide" as long as they last. This guide provides evaluations by competing special interests of state and federal legislators in California, where money came from in their last campaigns, and how each lawmaker voted on key legislation.
People can also dial the Voter's Research Hotline (888 VOTE SMART) for voter information.
Other election-information web sites are:
**San Mateo County election information: www.care.co.sanmateo.ca.us
**California Secretary of State: http://reform.ss.ca.gov
**California Voter Foundation: www.calvoter.org, or www.election.digital.com.
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