{"id":4130,"date":"2003-01-24T17:06:37","date_gmt":"2003-01-24T17:06:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4130"},"modified":"2003-01-24T17:06:37","modified_gmt":"2003-01-24T17:06:37","slug":"state-voter-guides","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/?p=4130","title":{"rendered":"state voter guides"},"content":{"rendered":"

I spent the morning discussing policies of the National<\/p>\n

Alliance for Civic Education<\/a>. The meeting was at the American Political<\/p>\n

Science Association (APSA) headquarters near Dupont Circle in Washington.<\/p>\n

I love the building, which is an elegant, Victorian, stone row house.<\/p>\n

I think the architecture could be described as Byzantine Revival—there’s<\/p>\n

an arch over the door carved with intricate plant forms. Inside, it’s<\/p>\n

rather ramshackle: little rooms, piles of reports, filing cabinets that<\/p>\n

don’t quite fit, window air-conditioning units. It reminds me of the houses<\/p>\n

at the periphery of major universities that get turned into anthropology<\/p>\n

departments or study-abroad offices. <\/p>\n

Two draft articles have come across my desk lately indicating that people—especially<\/p>\n

young people without a lot of education—are more likely to vote if<\/p>\n

they receive a state voter guide <\/b>in the mail. Washington and Oregon<\/p>\n

produce guides that give space to every candidate to describe his or her<\/p>\n

positions. Everyone (or every registered voter?) in the state gets one<\/p>\n

automatically. I’m becoming a zealot for voter guides because they lower<\/p>\n

the cost of acquiring information. They are also a form of campaign-finance<\/p>\n

reform, because they subsidize communication with state money—equally<\/p>\n

for all candidates—and thereby lower the value of each dollar of<\/p>\n

private money. Finally, you can make the candidates who choose to participate<\/p>\n

swear that their statements are truthful. Rep. Wes Cooley (R-OR) was convicted<\/p>\n

of lying<\/a> on official documents when he claimed in the voter guide<\/p>\n

that he had served in the special forces in Korea, when he had done no<\/p>\n

such thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I spent the morning discussing policies of the National Alliance for Civic Education. The meeting was at the American Political Science Association (APSA) headquarters near Dupont Circle in Washington. I love the building, which is an elegant, Victorian, stone row house. I think the architecture could be described as Byzantine Revival—there’s an arch over the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4130","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4130","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4130"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4130\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4130"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4130"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4130"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}