Are YOU an informed voter?

I got permission to re-post this, goodness knows I am not savvy enough to know all these links, but I do value my right to vote and know a good post when I see one!! So, thanks Em! She is just getting going with her blog, but you'll want to check back often because if this is any indication of the time, effort and energy she will put into her posts we are ALL in for a treat!

I believe that we should all exercise to vote in this country. There are many places around the world where people do not have this right or who have to go to great personal risk to exercise this right. This should serve as a lesson to each of us for whom voting is a fairly simple process. That said, the most difficult part about voting is being an informed voter. I know there are diverse opinions on politics and my purpose in writing this is not to sway you in any way, but to help you be the most informed voter that you can possibly be…

I will focus on national politics here, but I believe that it is equally important to be informed about local ballot issues and I hope to do another post regarding that before the current election cycle is over.

The first links here are resources that are generally considered unbiased fact checking organizations. I think knowing facts is especially important now that our news sources include a lot more citizen journalism (blogs), a 24 hour news cycle that rewards the first to break the story rather than accuracy, opinions that are not labeled in a traditional op-ed way, and pure politics on the parts of the campaigns. Hopefully you will use these sites to check the news stories from your favorite source whether that is CNN, Fox News, NPR or some other print, tv, radio, or internet site. I personally use the top three listed here most often, but you can look a little further at the others to find one that might work for you.

http://www.factcheck.org/
http://politifact.com/truth-o-meter/
http://blog.washingtonpost.com/fact-checker/

http://factchecked.org/ (oriented towards students)
http://www.ontheissues.org/
http://www.opensecrets.org/
http://vote-smart.org/
http://snopes.com/politics/

I have also included the presidential candidate’s websites so you can look at each of their policy proposals for yourself. Cutting out the middle man and thinking critically about what each candidate has written is a good place to start…

http://www.barackobama.com/issues/
http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/Issues/
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Last but not least - http://www.realclearpolitics.com/ is a good political news aggregator that gathers most current polls and information and serves it up in a format that is easy to look through and decipher.