Election 2008 Websites

At the Oct. 22 meeting of the Madison Macintosh Users Group, we'll immerse ourselves in the hot topic of the season. No, not Halloween: politics!

Most attention is focussed on the quadrennial race for the White House, and we'll certainly spend a fair amount of time on that. But there are lots of other races on the ballot as well. Wisconsin has no US Senate seats up for grabs this year, but, as always in an even-numbered year, all 8 seats in the US House of Representatives are open. Furthermore, we'll be electing all 99 State Assembly representatives and half of the 33 Wisconsin state senators.

To help you get ready for the election on Tue. Nov. 4, we'll tour of a flock of websites that are devoted to various aspects of the election. I'm your tour guide, Richard S. Russell, CPJ (certified political junkie), and below you'll see the sights and attractions that I've highlighted for your amazement and amusement.

Get a jump on the presentation by browsing thru these goodies in advance. Clearly, clearly there are way more websites out there than I've listed here. If you've got some faves you'd like me to cover (tho hardly any of these will get more than a minute or 2), by all means let me know (at RichardSRussell@tds.net) what they are.

Candidates
http://www.barackobama.com/
http://www.johnmccain.com/
http://www.bobbarr2008.com/
http://www.votenader.org/
http://votetruth08.com/

Candidate Matching
http://minnesota.publicradio.org/projects/ongoing/select_a_candidate/
http://www.okcupid.com/politics

Parties
https://www.democrats.org/
http://www.rnc.org/
http://www.wisdems.org/
http://www.wisgop.org/

Party Platforms
http://www.demconvention.com/the-democratic-platform/
http://www.gop.com/2008Platform/
http://www.wisdems.org/release_details.asp?id=44
http://www.wisgop.org/RPWPlatform.aspx

Civic Information
http://www.declareyourself.com/index.php
http://www.cityofmadison.com/clerk/
http://projectfairplay.org/
http://www.ci.madison.wi.us/election/voter/Where.cfm
http://vpa.wi.gov/VoterSearchScreen.aspx?Language=en-us
http://waml.legis.state.wi.us/

Horse Race
http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2008/calculator/
http://www.electoral-vote.com/
http://pollster.com/
http://realclearpolitics.com/
http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3750501
http://www.7-election.com/
http://tinyurl.com/69gr6d

Fact Checking
http://www.factcheck.org/
https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/
http://www.snopes.com/
http://www.truthorfiction.com/
http://www.votesmart.org/
http://wiscadproject.wisc.edu/

Legislative Record
http://www.senate.gov/pagelayout/legislative/g_three_sections_with_teasers/legislative_home.htm
http://clerk.house.gov/legislative/legvotes.html
http://www.govtrack.us/
http://themiddleclass.org/

Interest Groups
(There are a ton of these out there. I'm using my faves as a representative sample.)
http://www.uwalumni.com/home/alumniandfriends/advocacy/alumni4wisconsin/alumni4wisconsin.aspx
http://environmentamerica.candidanswers.org/
http://www.libertytreefdr.org/event.php?event_id=145
http://now.org/issues/election/elections2008/scorecard.html
http://sciencedebate2008.com/www/index.php
http://www.secularforum2008.org/
http://tinyurl.com/5n7ccz