First Post
Nebraska Citizen is a team effort. The goal is to collect information about as many of Nebraska's political races as possible. Right now most people in Nebraska vote about candidates without knowing what the candidate believes. There are a variety of reasons for this but we hope this blog and web site will help make information available in a format that is easy to read and to quickly discover what each candidate is about.
Not all politicians will voluntarily participate. The well organized campaigns with a lot of money will choose one or two issues and talk about those issues only, ignoring all other questions. These candidates believe they can run a name recognition campaign and be successful. These candidates believe it is important to restrict the amount of information the public has about them because every time they take a position they fear they will lose votes. At candidate school they are taught how to avoid and to turn all questions to the issues they have chosen to talk about.
As a result, voters typically elect the candidate that is packaged well even if that candidate holds many positions that the voter disagrees with. In races where there are too many voters for the candidate to be known on a personal basis, we usually elect the candidate that has the ability to raise the most money.
This is especially true for the Congressional, Statewide seats such as Treasure or Attorney General, Legislative, Regent, or Public Service Commission. Even NRD races and community collage races are have too large of a district for the candidate to be well known. The race for governor is one of the few races that the Main Stream Media actually finds out the position of each candidate and reports it. The voter rarely has good information to base their decision on for most of the other races
Nebraska Citizen believes the public is better served and that our government will work best when the people know who it is that they are voting for. Getting candidates to answers questions issues has always been difficult. Many simply will not answer any questions.
Therefore for Nebraska Citizen to be successful in finding out the positions of each candidate we will use the following approach.
First we will ask each candidate to fill out a questionnaire. If they fill it out, we will accept their answer and post their positions. We will permit the candidate to take as much room as they need to explain any position. The internet, as compared to other forms of the media, makes it very easy to permit someone to expand on a yes/no question.
Second, if the candidate will not answer the questionnaire, then we will send out our team of investigators to find the likely position of the candidate. We will use a variety of methods to do this. We will attend meetings, make phone calls, ask the candidates staff, friends, associates and look at any records that might exist. We will also accept reports from people that live in the area. Based on what we find and what is reported to us, we will fill in the candidate's position as accurately as we can. We will let the site visitor know if the position is one given voluntarily by the candidate or one that we had to work to find.
Third, if the candidate feels that our report of their position is incorrect, then we will always accept the candidate's clarification. We will always accept the candidate’s direct statement over any other source.
We believe this policy will result in information on many races that cannot be found anywhere. It will also require a group of people that care about politics. If you would like to join the team, please contact us.