Whole life is online.
No secrets.
So, last night I went looking to find what elected offices will be on the next election’s ballot and who’s running for them so I could contact them all about the pledge I posted yesterday.
And it turns out that the U.S. is even worse at democracy than I thought,
The electorate needs to know the schedule of upcoming elections, what the various deadlines are and who has filed to run in them.
This is absolutely fundamental information for the electorate to stay informed and even more fundamental for anyone in the electorate who’s looking to actually get involved in any way beyond voting.
This information should be publicly available and easy to find. In this modern information age, it should be published as a subscribeable calendar so you can always have the current info at hand just by looking at the calendar app on your phone.
Just putting it on a public web site would be OK, but we could do so much better than that.
Needless to say, the actual situation with this information is much worse than just being on a web site.
It doesn’t appear to be published anywhere.
It exists, of course; the county elections office does a pretty good job of actually holding the elections; they clearly have a calendar tracking all this stuff.
And the state gets ballots printed and distributed on time.
There are clearly several bits of the State tracking this stuff.
But no one is publishing it.
Well, some of the information is available or can be deduced from what’s available.
For example, my local county office does have a web site about elections, but rather than a list of what offices will be on upcoming ballots it has a list of what offices they handle the elections for, how the date for the position’s term is calculated and what the length of the term is.
You you could kinda calculate it yourself?
Kinda?
This is just absurdly bad.
I have difficulty believing that the situation could be this bad on accident.
For the public information to be this useless, surely you’d have to set out to meet some statutory obligation to make the information public but to obscure it as much as you possibly can while meeting the strictest letter of the obligation.
You couldn’t do this badly without putting in some real effort, surely?
It has to be intentional?
It really is no wonder that so few voters pay any attention to this stuff; it’s really difficult to even find out what’s supposed to be happening and when.
This has got to be fixed, and the secretive attitudes that lead to building such useless systems have got to be eliminated.
How are the citizens supposed to get involved and fix this country if we can’t even find out what offices will be up for election when and what the schedules are?
Oh, yeah; right.
From the perspective of the folks currently running things, we’re not.
This is not gonna end well.
