But limited.

First, I’m not sure I know what the ten issues are that concern me most. And what does “concern” mean? The ones that affect me personally? The ones I think are most important in an abstract way? Or the ones that I am most wedded to a particular right answer? I mean, I’m concerned about health care, but I’m much less concerned about the details of a candidate’s plan than I am about whether they’d be able to enact it.

And that’s the real problem with issues-based voting. Candidates may alter their policies after election, or simply lie about what they believe. (We sure never got the “compassionate conservative,” “walk humbly in foreign policy” Republican who ran in 2000, and that was even before 9/11.) And since a President can’t decree anything, many policy differences are far less important than whether they can drum up support, and have the wisdom and skill to convince people to follow them. Jimmy Carter was right about a lot of things, but he was a failure as President because he couldn’t get enough people to go along with him.

And I’m not sure I’m clear about why voting for cloture means we shouldn’t support Barack Obama for President in ‘08…

As I recall, I visited this site around February or early March of 2003 and it cranked out a result saying Dennis Kucinich scored around 93 out of 100 for me (since I’m even more to the left of him on many issues but far more pragmatic than him on tactics) but this nobody I’d never heard of called Howard Dean also happened to score very high. In fact, this Dean nobody guy was almost perfectly in line with everything I cared about on the survey except for gun control (he had an A NRA rating) but since I had ranked gun control fairly low, he still stayed up high.

That site caused me to take the first serious look at Dean long before anyone in the national media was giving him any attention. All I had to do after that was actually read Dean’s words on the Iraq War — having the balls to say the things no one else in the Democratic Party was willing to say — and I was hooked. Very soon after that was the MoveOn.org primary, and the rest, as they say, was history.

A couple of supposedly non-partisan groups do already run some clearinghouse sites that aggregate data on congressional voting records compared with issue-advocacy scorecards (NRA, NARAL, etc.)

The real downside to using advocacy group scorecards, however, is the group’s selective choice of which particular votes to include on the scorecard. For instance, NARAL is supposed to be the most important abortion rights advocacy group, right? And votes related to appointments to the Supreme Court are arguably one of the most, if not THE most, important votes regarding abortion rights, right? Well, when Alito was up for a vote, it was very clear to anyone who actually followed that confirmation that the only way battle there was the battle over a filibuster. If you voted for cloture on debate (and against filibuster), you basically were voting for Alito. After cloture, you could vote against Alito, but that didn’t really matter, because the only way to stop his appointment was through filibuster. But NARAL’s scorecard doesn’t count the cloture vote at ALL!!!!!

All this is really esoteric shit…and when it comes down to it, the average voter may absolutely support important things like habeus corpus or reproductive freedom, but not know that Alito threatened those and certainly wouldn’t know jack about how filbusters work…and wouldn’t know cloture from a hole in the wall.

And when I think about all this, I don’t accept the notion that we just throw up our hands and say, well, Americans are far too busy and far too overwhelmed with information to be expected to know what cloture is and why voting for cloture means we shouldn’t support Barack Obama for President in ‘08 even though he is pretty cute and makes a damn good feel-good speech. What I love about the growing blogosphere are those bloggers, like you, who aren’t just SF bloggers or infertility bloggers or skateboarding bloggers or political bloggers…someone who is a die-hard SF person might learn about filibustering here. I have friends in their 40’s in the infertility blogging community who learned about what a filibuster is for the first time last year while women were blogging about the Alito vote.

As Americans, we have a duty to educate ourselves and one another. We can’t just rail against the corporate media or self-promoting politicians. Maybe your Amazon for Voters is one way of doing this, but I think we need to go beyond having some “other”, some separate clearinghouse about elections that people only visit the day before an election. We’ve got to integrate civic awareness into ALL that we do and get more people involved and aware in an integrated way as well.

/rambling rant

But I like your system of matching candidates via your issues.

I do want to point out that the little system I outline above doesn’t actually say anything about electronic voting, it just helps you figure out who to push the button for. Once you get the list of candidates that match your line of thinking, the actual getting-your-ass-out-to-vote part is up to you.

I think it would be a big mistake to follow Amazon’s model all the way by putting a “one-click voting” link at the end of the recommendation. There really needs to be a disconnect between a system like this and the actual voting process.

1. Paper ballots (or receipts for electronic voting).

2. Multi-day voting.

3. Counting every vote.

I really want to see #2 and #3 implemented before we resort to an all-electronic method.