voter guides

This is awesome.

Someone has thrown together a website that aggregates YouTube videos illustrating the 2008 Presidential candidates views on 9 of the most pressing public policy issues. Users or campaigns are free to submit videos for inclusion in the site, and there is a ratings system built in to determine the usefulness of the video. There looks to be about 40 candidates in all - basically everyone under the sun - but the major players are getting top billing.

Normally I'm not a fan of the idea of voter guides. As a mass-turnout strategy, there is some evidence that they are not effective. A lot of times you'll hear that folks don't vote because they feel uninformed and don't want to make the wrong choice. But evidence suggests that voter guides - lengthy, text heavy affairs - don't alleviate those concerns. Maybe people don't read them, maybe they don't trust them. Maybe "I don't know enough" is just an excuse for someone who really doesn't want to vote.

I don't know. And - as in a lot of youth research - turnout is the measurement. Very rarely do we get reliable statistics about whether a particular tactic increases partisanship, which strike me as the potential outcome of a good voter guide. (But this is a whole other ball of wax).

Nevertheless, this experiment by The Pittsburgh League of Young Voters seems like a promising reinvention of the voter guide concept. They're creating short interviews with local candidates, posting them on YouTube, and aggregating them on their website along with information about where people vote, and which candidates are running in their districts.

Maybe these will be more effective - at increasing turnout, or at increasing partisanship in voting. Video gives you a much better sense of these (normally very obscure) candidates as human beings, and these videos are certainly more comprehensible and accessible than pages of text listing the issue positions of dozens of candidates. It's also nice that they boiled it down to the two issues that are of most concern to The League and its members.

This also seems pretty doable for a lot of groups. With iMovie (included on any Apple) and a throw-away digital video camera, or even a cellphone with video options, you can probably capture 30 seconds of worthwhile video. Sound might present a bit of a problem. I'd love to hear what any audio/video folks think.

Also - I added some stuff to the Online Video article in the Communications section of the wiki. If you've got more to add, please do.