(Full Disclosure) I’m the founder and CEO of FourScore, a nonpartisan and politically unaffiliated website that helps voters pick their candidates and helps candidates connect with their community. FourScore has solved the problem of voters not knowing who to vote for and candidates not knowing what issues are most important to their community. FourScore is new and not yet available to everyone, so I’m going to show you how to pick your ideal candidates without using FourScore.
For an excellent example of an election with a lot of choices, last week Salt Lake County saw 263 candidates file to compete for 95 elected offices. Some races like the race for Utah’s 3rd US Congressional District has 22 candidates competing for a single seat. Lesser known but equally important races such as West Jordan Mayor and Midvale Mayor each have six candidates running in each one of those races. Salt Lake City Council Districts 3 and 7 each have six candidates running; Salt Lake City District 1 has three candidates and District 5 has five candidates running.
These races make up only a small fraction of the highly competitive races that will certainly heat up this summer as we get closer to the local primary on August 15th, 2017.
So the question will inevitably be asked;
“Who should I vote for?” Many people and political organizations would love to answer that question for you.
They’re counting on you to be a low-informed or uninformed voter. I’m here to tell you as someone who used to, for years, help campaigns build winning strategies that counted on low-informed voter turnout, you and only you should answer that question. To get started, I recommend focusing on the issues as a way to select your ideal political candidate.
Let’s get started:
1. Understand what issues are most important to you
This is important. By knowing which issues you care about the most, you can then start evaluating candidates based on where they stand on those issues. Sometimes figuring out what those issues are can be more difficult than you might think. It takes a practical approach of evaluating all the issues side-by-side and deciding what three or four are the most important in your life.
To do this, think up all the issues you can. Then rate each issue by how important it is to you. Then, categorize each issue as a local, state or federal issue. Understanding where each issue goes can take a little research.
FourScore has streamlined this process to be quick, easy and fun. With very little effort and time you will be able to evaluate all the issues and pick the ones that are most important to you.
2. Figure out where the candidates stand on the issues that are most important to you
Candidates like to talk about the things they like to talk about. If one of those things is important to you, HORRAY! you got lucky. For most however, the odds of knowing where a candidate stands on the issues important to you (ex. graffiti, traffic congestion, water rates and school taxes) is pretty low.
To do this without using FourScore you’ll want to first get a sample copy of your ballot. This can often be obtained by visiting you County Clerk’s election website and requesting a sample ballot for your address. The next step is to list out each candidate and visit their webpage, Facebook page, Twitter account and LinkedIn profile. You’ll then need to compile news articles and video from legacy news sources related to each candidate. From there you can start going through all that content to try and discover where the candidate stands on the 3 or 4 issues that are most important to you.
FourScore has completly removed this step for the you, the voter, by taking the candidates through the same issue-discovery process that you completed in step 1. So, instead of you having to go through each issue for each candidate, the candidate does it on their own. This gets the candidate’s position on all the issues first-hand so you as the voter can easily see where they stand and without having to spend three weeks doing it yourself.
3. Compare all the candidates and their political positions side-by-side with your political positions
No way to sugarcoat it, this part is a whipping. You’ll first need to line up all the candidates and draw a matrix around where they stand on all the issues relative to where you, the voter, stands. A weight needs to be assigned to each position according to how important that issue is to you. Then, grade each issue matchup/mismatch. The candidates with the highest scores should be considered your best option for representation.
If the election isn’t a big one or there are not many candidates then this manual process can be done with little time invested. But, if it’s an election like the one getting ready to happen on August 15th in Salt Lake County where you have 22 candidates competing for Utah’s 3rd US Congressional District, or 6 candidates running for Mayor in West Jordan, then you better carve out a couple weekends.
FourScore has made this 3rd step and the entire process of picking the best candidate in a race, very simple. By completing step 1 using FourScore, you skip step 2 and 3. FourScore will assign a FourSCORE for each candidate on your ballot, relative to how politically similar the candidates are to you. A process that used to take weeks can now be done over a single cup of coffee.
FourScore is a non-partisan website built to help voters and candidates find each other based on the important issues.
For those voters in Salt Lake County who want to go it alone without FourScore, here’s a head start: List of all the candidates and races happening in Salt Lake County on Aug. 15, 2017
