Thursday, October 27, 2016

What's a Voter to Do?

This is not a rant about the upcoming elections or the downgrading of political discourse in America. This is a post about the unsexy mechanics of making sure our democracy works. Two days ago, I wanted to look up the down-ballot issues and candidates for my district as I've heard so little this election season apart from the presidential race. I went to the Maryland board of election site and was troubled by what I found - a number of helpful links to candidate information were broken. I sent the following email to the published email address:

I was prepping for the election by looking up ballot information athttps://voterservices.elections.maryland.gov/VoterResults and looked up a candidate’s Facebook page – Robert Wayne Miller for BOE in Howard County. The link was incorrect (missing a colon). The incorrect link was: https//www.facebook.com/Miller4BoE. The correct link is:https://www.facebook.com/Miller4BoE.
 Then I started checking on all of the links and noted that a number of other links were incorrect. Below are the correct links. Most of them are missing a colon after “http”, but some are just wrong.
Robert Wayne Miller’s financial disclosures link (I could not find the correct link, but the current one is missing the ID at the end:https://campaignfinance.maryland.gov/public/ViewCommittee/CCFID/Hillary Clinton’s Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/hillaryclinton/Tim Kaine’s FB account: https://www.facebook.com/timkaineBill Weld’s financial disclosures link (I could not find the correct link)
John Sarbanes’ FB account: https://www.facebook.com/jsarbanesJohn Sarbanes’ Instagram account: https://www.instagram.com/johnsarbanes/ (the entire link is incorrect – this is the correct link)
Janet Siddiqui’s FB account: https://www.facebook.com/siddiquijanet (the entire link is incorrect – this is the correct link)
 Please correct the website. I would appreciate receiving an email back when you’ve fixed these links.
 Thanks so much!
 Ross D. Martin, MD, MHA
Concerned Citizen (who is geeky enough to click lots of buttons on a website)
I've received no response and have not seen any changes. Are there other failed links in other districts? Is there any consistency in terms of link quality along party lines. No conclusions from me but I will note that most of these links are for Democrats. 

Let's crowd source this question and make something happen.