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Basic Local Voting Information
Elections in MI
Basic information for Michigan voters, including Michigan Voter Registration Application, a Video Demonstration of Optical Scan Voting, the Michigan Voter Information Center, and Michigan Election Law
Absentee Voter Guide
This guide contains all the information college students need to vote by absentee ballot from school. Click on the interactive U.S. map to view absentee voting details for each state, including deadlines, dates, and contacts. Also available as a downloadable document. From the Harvard University Institute of Politics.
The League of Women Voters offers two excellent sites:
Publius.org and Voter Guides—Oakland County Area.
Publius allows you to enter your name as it appears on your voter registration card, and to view your ballot, polling location, find out about candidates and proposals and how to use your voting equipment. The Voter Guide is a thorough and impartial guide to candidates and issues.
General Resources (News & Opinion)
CNN Politics 2008
CNN continues to be the go-to destination for everything and anything related to politics. Whether it's covering the Democratic or Republican National Conventions, the campaign trail, or the latest domestic issues, you'll receive up-to-the-minute news and commentary. The news network has also been offering live video feeds from the Democratic convention floor in Denver all week. Keep checking CNN's Electoral College map, which estimates the number of electoral votes each candidate is predicted to receive come November.
Election 2008
News and analysis about the 2008 presidential election. Includes profiles, photos galleries, comparison of stands on selected issues, and quizzes to test how well you know candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. Also includes material about local races in Chicago and Illinois. From the Chicago Tribune.
FactCheck.org
Between the media and the Web, we're not always getting the most accurate information. FactCheck.org squashes the political rumors and debunks the myths with its extensive research team. For instance, many citizens are claiming that Barack Obama's birth certificate is faked—not true, says FactCheck. An ad claiming McCain voted against increasing health care benefits for veterans is also fals—FactCheck discovered that McCain has voted repeatedly to increase benefits. Best of all, the site will answer your questions on current political or policy issues.
On the Issues (Every Political Leader on Every Issue)
This site's mission is to provide non-partisan information for voters in the Presidential election, so that votes can be based on issues rather than on personalities and popularity.
Information is gathered daily from newspapers, speeches, press releases, and the Internet—a labor-intensive process that requires countless volunteer hours.
opensecrets.org: 527 Committee Activity
527 groups are tax-exempt organizations that engage in political activities, often through unlimited soft money contributions. Most 527s on this list are advocacy groups trying to influence federal elections. ... 527s must report their contributors and expenditures" to the government. This site provides current information about the top 50 committees and top contributors and individual donors. From the Center for Responsive Politics.
Politifact.com: Truth-O-Meter
A joint project between Congressional Quarterly and the St. Petersburg Times, this is a most enjoyable and informative site dedicated to political fact-checking.
The Presidential Debates
News and analysis about the September and October 2008 presidential and vice presidential debates. Includes full video of the debates (where you can jump ahead to a particular topic using a timeline and find key words or phrases on the timeline), video and transcripts of Democrat and Republican debates, and video highlights of past presidential debates. From MSNBC.
Project VoteSmart: The Voter's Self-Defense System
Provides a wealth of information, including:
- Voting Records—Compare what your representatives said during the campaign with how they actually voted on the record.
- Biographical & Contact Information about Dandidates—from their previous professions, education, families, organizational membership to their latest e-mail address
- Issue Positions (Political Courage Test)—testing thousands of candidates for President, Congress, Governor and State Legislature with a "Political Courage Test". The test accurately measures a candidate's willingness to provide voters with their positions on the issues they will most likely face if elected to represent you.
- Interest Group Ratings—Over 150 competing special interest groups, from conservative to liberal, evaluate your representatives. Look at what they say.
- Public Statements—The Project constantly collects speeches and public comments of the president, governors, and congressional representatives. Just type in a word, say; 'immigration' and all public utterances containing the word 'immigration' will appear. Compare what they said while campaigning in California a few years ago to what they are saying now in New Hampshire.
- Campaign Finances—How much money did your representatives raise and from whom? Just follow the money and then follow the votes.
Real Clear Politics
Founded in 2000, RealClearPolitics is a Chicago-based site that aggregates news from a plethora of sources including the Chicago Sun-Times, The New York Times, and Salon.com. If that's not enough, you'll also find editorials, political news and analyses, transcripts and speeches, and the most recent poll data. Check out the Real Clear Politics blog for original content and commentary. Visit the site on your mobile handheld.
Slate Magazine: News & Politics
With analysis and commentary on politics, business, and other important topics, the daily online magazine Slate is one of the key places to visit during the election season. The News & Politics section is broken up into 17 subcategories including The XX Factor (female political bloggers), Today's Paper (what's hot in the major U.S. newspapers), and Kausfiles (Mickey Kaus's political blog). The site even has its own Democratic Convention Twitter feed.
U. of M. Documents Center: Elections 2008
An enormously information-rich site assembled by Univeristy of Michigan Librarians offering a wealth of data on every aspect of the election process, candidates, issues, and even post-election lists of positions available for Presidential appointment, pay scale, and incumbents.
USA Today: Politics
News and analysis about the 2008 presidential election. Includes material about public financing of campaigns, a candidate match game in which you discover which candidate (Barack Obama or John McCain) shares your views on selected issues, a poll tracker for head-to-head match-ups, background about candidates, and more. From USA Today, a division of Gannett Company.
Political Blogs
AMERICAblog.com
You may not be too familiar with this outspoken political blog, so you'll want to keep AMERICAblog on your radar. You'll find gratifying its assiduous efforts for straight talk when it comes to U.S. politics, especially when discussing the Bush Administration and civil rights.
Daily Kos
Founded by Markos Moulitsas Zúniga (nicknamed "Kos"), liberals will enjoy the Daily Kos's banter, mixed in with thorough news reports, stern opinions, and moving interviews. Many political figures publish content to the site as well, including Congressman Brad Miller, Governor of New Mexico Bill Richardson, and Senator Barbara Boxer.
Drudge Report
Matt Drudge's Drudge Report, notorious for being the first to break the Monica Lewinsky scandal to the public, posts links to important stories of the day for the conservative set. Sure, his site isn't as flashy as other political news sites, but you might like its simplistic design—it makes it easier to spot news you want to read quickly.
The Huffington Post
When not busy perusing the business, entertainment, and living sections of The Huffington Post, click on the Politics tab for news and opinion regarding the presidential candidates and the election. If you don't have time to read an entire post on a subject, just click on "Quick Read" to view a snippet of that post. The site also features commentary—from the likes of historian and political writer Bob Ostertag, political writer Erik Ose, and others—on its Political Blogs page.
Politico
Covering Congress' agendas, the 2008 presidential election, and lobbying and advocacy, Politico is chock-full of everything you need to keep up with today's U.S. politics. It features news, columns, videos, photo slideshows, forums, and seven candid blogs by the Politico staff.
techPresident
Technology has had a major impact on the 2008 election, from Barack Obama's 460,000 MySpace friends to the important issue of net neutrality to McCain's computer illiteracy. The Personal Democracy Forum early last year launched techPresident to cover "how the candidates are using the Web, and how the Web is using them." techPresident is broken down into several sections including a daily political news blog; Charts displaying the social networking stats and supporters of each candidate from MySpace, YouTube, and Facebook; and Resources, which features links to official candidate Web sites and blogs as well as a staffwiki and a look at each candidate's tech policies.
Wonkette
Wonkette will have you coming back on a daily basis for snarky political commentary and gossip. Just check out the site's recent posts, such as "Joe Biden In The 70s: Would You Hit It?" and "Offensive Cocktail Dress To Blame For Michelle Obama's Failure Of A Speech." Gotta love election season!
Polls & Tracking
Election Dashboard
Troy-based business intelligence technology developers iDashboards offers this unique graphical tool built on a Flex-based architecture using Flash animation to provide a detailed breakdown of candidate support by race, age, state, gender, marital status and educational background.
Additional information includes a map of state electoral votes and financial details about the political parties. The Presidential Election Dashboard uses color-coded graphs to enable voters to identify and track candidate support. To obtain finer details, users can utilize the unique hover-and-click capability to drill-down further, examining specific elements; in this case the candidates’ support groups.
FiveThirtyEight.com ("Electoral Projections Done Right")
If you're engrossed with following daily projections, FiveThirtyEight.com (the number refers to the amount of electors in the Electoral College) provides its own election projections by analyzing polling and political data. Charts, graphs, and polling averages on the site are said to be refreshed once per day. As of August 26, the site projects that Obama has 285.3 electoral votes to McCain's 252.7. FiveThirtyEight.com is also busily covering the Democratic and Republican Conventions.
Glassbooth.org
The 2008 presidential election is quickly approaching, so if you still don't know who you're going to vote for, this site is a great place to start. On Glassbooth.org, you're asked a series of questions that will match you with the candidate whose views are closest to your own. First, choose which topics are most important to you, including the Iraq war, medical marijuana, the economy, and the environment. Then you'll go on to the quiz, checking off whether you strongly oppose or strongly agree with the presented issue. At the end, your results will indicate which candidate shares your beliefs. Be sure to check out the Explore Candidates section, where you can find out where each candidate stands on every issue
Social Networking & Video
PoliticsTV.com
The content offered on this political Web site is strictly video: ad campaigns, speeches, news, and opinion. You can view Ted Kennedy's Democratic Convention speech, John McCain's mansions, an interview with Michelle Obama, and more.
You2Gov
Start your own political interest group, post comments, and interact with others on You2Gov.com. Currently in beta, this social networking site with a political focus also offers the latest political news, a political events calendar, and the recently launched Convention Blog, which features credentialed bloggers from all over the country covering the conventions.
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