Paperwhite Musings: October 2008

I found this via Lifehacker and thought I would pass it along. If you are like me you still have a lot of questions about the candidates and the key issues but dont know where to find some answers. Hopefully this will help a little...

It's hard these days to imagine how elections happened before the web grew to popularity. With all the instant-access news, video, data, and social networking available in a few seconds' time, election season is a prime time to dig in and find out where the candidates are getting and spending money, what's being said by and about them and which of it is true, and how to make sure you get your vote in on Nov. 4. Read on for a roundup of 10 tools to get politically savvy this election season and beyond.

10. Compare the candidates.

Unless you're working on a campaign, chances are you don't know where each candidate stands on every issue. McCain's take on net neutrality? Barack's stance on school vouchers? SelectSmart's 2008 Presidential Candidate Selector gives you the skinny on the major-topic stances of every candidate, including most of the third-party contenders. Those are the five-minute takes; for a multitude of quotes straight from the candidates' mouths on the issues, tryOnTheIssues.org.

9. Go poll-crazy at FiveThirtyEight.com.

Nate Silver is a total data geek, but he knows how to apply it to interesting topics. He proved that with Baseball Prospectus, which projects performance by players and teams, and he's striking out to do the same for election results. Silver's FiveThirtyEight grabs all the polls it can find, weighs them based on methodologies and past accuracy, projects data for regions where it can't find polls, then runs thousands of simulated elections to come up with a likely outcome. Silver's site currently has Obama walking away with it; if nothing else, it'll be interesting to see, come Election Day, how database projections fared with real people.

8. Get your video fix at YouTube's You Choose '08.

Sure, it's mostly campaign ads, he-said-she-said coverage, and other videos that are, depending on views, reassuring or infuriating. But YouTube's You Choose '08 section is a central source of all attacks, scandals, video evidence of gaffes and quotes, and occasionally, informative video. Bookmark it and feel better about fast-forwarding through the ads when they blanket your television in the coming weeks.

7. Follow the money.

Spending's become a much-debated issue, at least in this part of the race to the White House. Using some cool visualization tools, you can get all kinds of specific data on the wheres and whats of government spending. This Google Earth layer adds pinpoints wherever appropriated money is being sent, although it leans heavily toward military and homeland security bills. The graph-happy folks at Many Eyes have put together a ton of interactive (and usually Java-required) tools, including this earmarks visualization of per-capita earmark spending. Now you're not just mad, you're madly informed.

6. See what the candidates said about your hot-button topic.

Google Labs offers two neat search tools that let you get beyond the basic talking points and read or see the candidates speaking on any topic. In Quotes lets you type a term and see how Obama and McCain referenced it in speeches, interviews, and other places.GAudi, the YouTube-searching audio index tool, does basically the same thing, but points you to specific points in a video where they said it. Oddly enough, neither candidate has said anything so far about Google, Gmail, or YouTube, according to those tools.

5. Find out how and where to vote.

In all the never-ending debate and fervor of an election season, it can be easy to forget that it's all about, you know, actually showing up and casting your ballot. Google's Voter Info Map, run as a partnership with the League of Women Voters, makes short work of finding out if you can still register (today is the last day in New York and others, for example), where you go to vote, where to grab an absentee ballot, and your local board of elections web site.

4. Vote early with a no-excuse absentee ballot.

You probably don't know exactly what your schedule will look like on Election Day, or how crowded your polling place will be. In 28 states, you can skip the early-morning/lunch break/after-work jam and vote with an absentee ballot, no excuse required. The Early Voting Information Center runs down the particulars of getting the jump on your right as a citizen.

3. Track developing stories on blogs and news sites.

Political veterans (or just jaded political wonks) always see an "October surprise" in an election year. See what stories and trends are gaining ground and staying there with two search tools: Microsoft's Political Streams, part of its Live Labs, follows news stories across blogs, portals, and other aggregators, tracking how often, and for how long, it's getting linked and written about. Google's revamped blog search is more specific to blog-generated articles and the buzz they generate. Both are worth checking when you're looking to see how stories are spun, refuted, and propagated across the web.

2 Track fund raising and donations by candidates (and your neighbors).

Want to see what interests, businesses, and individuals the candidates are helping line the candidates war chests? OpenSecrets.org has maps, graphs, and details that can keep you busy for days. But, honestly, it's more fun to see who in your neighborhood is giving to whom. Luckily, you can get just that specific at Fundrace 2008, a Google Map mashup run by the Huffington Post blog network (you'll see their left-leaning post links, but the data is straight-up). You can search donations by street, city, company, or occupation.

1. Get beyond the spin at FactCheck.org.

Run by the non-partisan, non-profit Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, FactCheck.org has been a go-to source for years whenever politicians claims that they, or their opponent, did or didn't do something that just seems a tad bit unbelievable. You can track the latest spins and truths by RSS or email alerts, but the site updates pretty quickly with blow-by-blows after debates, major news stories, and other events that cry out for a little objective double-checking.