TL:DR – go to http://www.considerbernie.com and share it with your friends. Thanks!
As some of you know, I am mildly obsessed with the prospect of Bernie Sanders, United States Senator from Vermont, making a run for the Democratic nomination for the Presidential election in 2016.
When Bernie officially announced, and this is serious, I called his office in Washington, I called his office in Burlington, I emailed every email address on his website, and I posted to Reddit, hoping to use my weird collection of internet and technology skills to work for his campaign – Google Analytics? Done. Growth engineering? Give me the keys to Optimizely and _get out of the way_.
I never heard back. I was, and am, seriously disappointed. As an employed tech professional offering a valuable skillset for $0, it’s a real bummer to make a genuine, heartfelt effort and have it fall upon deaf ears.
So, I built a thing: www.considerbernie.com – it’s a simple WP site that displays different reasons on each refresh. Reasons, that is, to consider Bernie!
So check it out – if you think it could use some work, let me know, I’m happy to make it better. If you like it, let’s get some legs on this thing, maybe I’ll finally hear back from the campaign!
Simon Ouderkirk 
The first one that loaded for me was the 80% of young people do not vote. I grew up in a country where voting is compulsory. We even get fined for not voting. I’m not sure how I feel about this rule since it seems crazy to have to force people to vote but having grown up with it it seemed quite normal at the time. So I would not object to Britain introducing something similar. Although having said that, compulsory voting did not stop Australians from electing Tony Abbott 😦
I had no idea you could get fined for not voting – how does that work?
If you’re enrolled to vote – and everyone is required to enrol to vote when they turn 18 – they have your postal address. If you don’t vote, they send you a fine for $20 – http://www.aec.gov.au/faqs/voting_australia.htm. If you move country you can ring or write to tell them that you’re no longer resident and there’s no longer a requirement to vote so I haven’t voted in Australia for many years.
Do folks do a lot of write ins, or fake names, if they’re unhappy with the potential candidates?
People are usually registered under real names but if they don’t like the candidates and don’t want to vote then they’ll invalidate their vote so it’s not counted. For instance, they’ll number every candidate with a “1” or leave the card blank or something like that. So in a sense, even with compulsory voting, there’s still the choice not to vote as it’s fairly easy to invalidate the vote, especially with preferential voting.
I hope that you hear from the campaign soon! As someone who’s volunteered for both political and non-political causes for years, I’m not too shocked with the fact that your email hasn’t generated a response. Chances are, they’re still very much in the early stages of the campaign and are deluged with requests and offers from all sides, plus all the demands of actually launching what’s essentially a big-small business from scratch.
When my husband and I volunteered for the Nader/Green Party campaign in 2004, we were appalled at how disorganized his Dallas campaign was, well into the primary season. We didn’t even hear about a major fundraising event in the next town until literally the afternoon of – and it was held in a close friend’s brother’s house! That disorganization and confusion seems to be pretty endemic among small, scrappy campaigns, but hopefully Sanders and his team will get their act together very soon.
Good luck!
Here’s hoping! I’ll be in Burlington in August, if I haven’t heard by then, maybe I’ll swing by 🙂
Looking forward to reading all about your experiences! As a poli sci major in college and grad school, this is like catnip for me. 🙂
Reblogged this on Mad About the Dogs.