Our Candidate Challenge
Last year I, along with my fellow Why Tuesday? correspondents, asked many of the 2008 presidential candidates and their colleagues (on video) if they knew why we vote on Tuesday in the United States, a day smack in the middle of the workweek.
Well, we talked to Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards, Mike Gravel, Dennis Kucinich, Chris Dodd and Duncan Hunter, and most didn't know the answer... yet all of them agreed that election reform is an issue worth discussing. But despite the fact that two-thirds of Americans are in favor of reforming our election processes, there is a deafening silence in the public sphere about this vitally important issue.
So that gave us an idea: the Why Tuesday? Candidate Challenge. We've asked all presidential candidates to, by October 31st, lay out their plan for fixing America's broken voting system in a video response to be posted on our website.
Out of respect for those who forty years ago fought so hard to open the voting booth to all Americans, we're endeavoring to end the silence of good people by calling upon our presidential candidates to join us in an important dialogue.
The challenge is pretty simple. All the candidates have to do is answer the following questions in a video response and, in so doing, share their views about our voting system with all Americans:
* Do you agree that our voting system is broken?
* If so, what specific steps would you take in the first year of your presidency to reinstill vigor and confidence in our electoral processes?
* Finally, do you believe that Congress should revisit the decision made in 1845 to make “the Tuesday after the first Monday in November,” the one and only day when Americans can chose who will lead this nation?
So far, the only taker: Senator Joe Biden... and that's only because I ran into him at a D.C. coffee shop and happened to have my video camera.
Why are many presidential candidates reluctant to make election reform a central campaign issue? When more votes are cast for American Idol than president of the United States, and in 15 of our 50 states the only option is to cast a ballot on a day set over 100 years ago to make voting convenient for the largely agrarian society of the time, shouldn't we be talking about an upgrade?
Jacob, I gotta say, dude, you seem very on script so far. I understand that you want the candidates to commit to election reform, and that's great. But instead of telling us about that, why don't you tell us what you think election reform would look like and why it would be better.
October 16, 2007 4:30 PM | Reply | Permalink
In my opinion, the question of voting reform is second only to the question of the restoration of the Bill of Rights.
October 16, 2007 5:21 PM | Reply | Permalink
I know I'm increasingly on old fogey on this, but would it be ok to ask that those links go to text that hints at what the candidates said. I read, say, one about how we might wait for a witty response, but by then I'd wasted 30 second on nothing more than you and a colleague saying they're here to ask the question we already knew, then a minute mixing silence and, to me, an inaudible Clinton response, and by then I'd given up. Is a political movement just about putting our own nice, friendly faces on the Web?
This video thing is getting to me. I can't learn what's on Josh's site in terms of content half the time without committing more time (and audio noise at work) than I can. And on the links to other candidates, where text was given, it took four words (Edwards wants a holiday), while the clip took 4 minutes to load and play.
This reminds me why the idea in Dean's thread that we needn't worry about copyright because books are dead in the Web age is garbage. You can say something in words that takes 10 seconds to read, or you can listen to babble for 5 minutes. Well, end of old fogey's rant.
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 17, 2007 8:49 AM | Reply | Permalink
Oh, what's it mean that only Biden was a taker? Didn't those other clips go to responses?
John
http://www.haberarts.com/
October 17, 2007 8:50 AM | Reply | Permalink
We issued the challenge on September 25th. Since then no candidates, other than Biden, despite repeated inquiries to their campaigns, have submitted a video response answer the above questions. All of the other videos were shot over the past year as part of our Get Out The Why? initiative. Our "challenge" to the candidates is that the respond specifically to the questions we've outlined above. If they don't respond by October 31st, we're most likely going to hit the road and bring the challenge to the candidates.
October 17, 2007 9:14 AM | Reply | Permalink
We need some sort of Condorcet Voting System.
October 17, 2007 1:20 PM | Reply | Permalink