Vote Smart's President, Richard Kimball, discusses the challenges that voters face when choosing who represents them and the work that Vote Smart does by pulling the weight of false facts in order to make sure that every voter has access to the facts when they go to the polls.
Vote Smart Does the Hard Work So You Don’t Have to.
"Citizens march by the thousands, repenting their failure to self-govern well. We whine to friends, sign petitions, make contributions, and walk the streets looking for honorable leaders that are no longer visible within the nasty knot of politicians we must select our leaders from.
There is only one certain and sensible thing to do, but in a culture that has become accustomed to quick satisfactions we seem unwilling to accept its one demand: a sustained struggle to self-educate, inform ourselves with a civics education anchored in the facts and truth, that successful self-governance requires.
School civics education has dropped by 1% every year for thirty years. The collective civics education that legacy media once provided has been replaced by new media which buries each story on policy under nine other frivolous accounts of political nonsense.
We would be fools to cast out the power to run our lives to millions of strangers (as democracy requires), without insuring those strangers are anchored in reality. However, that is exactly what we now do.
Long ago, Vote Smart recognized that honorable, ethical politicians were under siege and failing to survive. Today, no honorable person wants to offer themselves for public service in this new culture that sees honorable, ethical, dignified conduct as impractical and imprudent.
Vote Smart is like a Big Mac. We do the work so citizens can find easy satisfaction, should they care about facts at all. We do the hard, sustained, essential work that insures each citizen easy access to abundant, accurate, factual information about those we elect or those hoping to replace them.
We need every thinking American to take a stand for dignity and help preserve our self-respect by defending every citizen’s right to the facts."
Richard Kimball
Vote Smart President