By all accounts, the coronavirus pandemic is making campaigning particularly difficult this year, and so Election 2020 is certain to be memorable for its many new challenges.
Aside from the presidency, Connecticut will have an opportunity on Nov. 3 to change the makeup of its state Senate and House of Representatives, as well as its Congressional delegation.
To help voters get to know their candidates – and also to help candidates reach their constituents – we have retooled and relaunched Vote.CTNewsJunkie.com. The site is improved and is perhaps a much more valuable tool this year than it was in the past simply based on the difficulty of going door-to-door to talk to voters. We have created an excellent vehicle here for every candidate to get their ideas out to their voters. Completed profiles and surveys are designed to be shared on social media, where civil discussion of issues is encouraged. We’ll be sharing completed questionnaires on our Facebook page as well.
Candidates who filed their paperwork with the State Election Enforcement Commission should have all received an email Sunday evening inviting them to fill out both their candidate profile and to complete our survey questions. If you didn’t receive one and are a registered candidate for a state Senate or House seat, . We are still in the process of setting up the Congressional surveys but should have those ready this week and will send additional invitations at that time.
On arrival, visitors are asked to allow the site to access your location – when you access from home, this means you’ll be able to quickly ascertain who is running for the General Assembly locally.
The goal here is to get as much participation as possible from all of Connecticut’s General Assembly candidates, and then to push their completed questionnaires out to as many readers as possible. Once the candidates have completed their profile and questionnaire, their pages can be shared on social networks.
You can find a specific District or Candidate using the menu buttons, and Districts that contain a completed questionnaire are highlighted with a green checkmark.
{media_3}We’ve also set up an “endorse” function for voters to show their support. It requires a quick registration via email and once you’ve done that and endorsed a candidate, you are prompted with the candidate’s page and the option to share that endorsement on Twitter or Facebook. Each candidate’s endorsement total will be tracked at the top of their questionnaire. Have at it!
We have ironed out some bugs in this newest version of Vote.CTNewsJunkie.com and have added the option to include a campaign video in the candidate profiles – an additional venue to increase viewership on that content.
Feel free to if you’re having any problems using the site or if you have some suggestions.
And our gratitude goes out to Matt Zagaja, a true public servant and civic tech developer who has basically built this thing from scratch based on a few loosely organized ideas over the past few years. Thank you, Matt!
We also want to thank AARP Connecticut for sponsoring this project once again.
Candidates – if you or your campaign manager haven’t received an email from our system inviting you to fill out your questionnaire, and we’ll get you setup to complete the questionnaire as soon as possible.
—Christine Stuart & the CTNewsJunkie crew
