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Where to Go To Review the Voting Records Of Candidates

Voting Ballot

Do you ever wonder how a candidate like Mike Crapo might feel about a certain issue that is near and dear to your personal interests? For example, if you are a home owner, you might wonder if a particular Republican or Democratic Congressperson has any opinion on reforming home interest rates in your state. There are many issues that affect people in different parts of the country in vastly different ways. If you are a conscientious voter who is interested in reviewing your favorite candidate's voting record, you'll be glad to know that there are plenty of resources to check out on the Internet.

Why Is It So Important To Be Familiar With Voting Records?

Every time the House of Representatives or the Senate takes a vote on an important issue, that vote gets recorded. The issue in question may be a new bill, a vote on the possible repeal of a previous law, or even a vote to override a Presidential veto. Whatever the issue may be, regardless of the outcome, the vote gets recorded in history for all time. More to the point, the particular manner in which a Congressman like Mike chooses to vote also gets recorded. And each vote is then made available on a variety of platforms, many of which are directly accessible for free on the World Wide Web.

The More Info You Possess, the Better Your Choice Will Be

It's important for you as a voter to be aware of the voting patterns of your personal Senator and Representative, like Crapo. You are free to agree or disagree with their opinions and motives for voting as they do, but it's crucial that you do know how their ultimate votes are cast. The direction in which a Senator or Representative votes, especially when it comes to the issues that concern you most, may well become your ultimate criteria for choosing whether or not to support that person with your vote on Election Day. In such circumstances, the more you know, the more informed your own ultimate choice will be.

Voting Records Can Reveal Some Pleasant and Unexpected Surprises

One thing to keep in mind when you check the voting records of the candidates that most interest you is that checking their voting records can uncover some pretty amazing revelations. If you never thought to ask how a certain candidate has voted when it comes to the action in Libya or the fight over the Trans-Pacific Pipeline, checking out their voting records might give you a startling surprise. The time to find such surprises is before the election, not after.

Where Can You Go To Find The Voting Records Of Politicians?

There are many resources on the Web that you can turn to in order to discover the voting records of all of the Congressional members of your state, as well as those of politicians who are running in the national election. Do a quick Google search for "Congressional Voting Records" or "(name of politician) Voting Records" and you're bound to come across a dozen or more resources that you can access for free. This last point deserves some additional commentary: The voting records of Congressional members are made available in many different places for no charge whatsoever. And if you have questions about the election voting process, you may consult election voting services.

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Make It Easy for Your Customers

Mrs. Curl A-List VoteAwhile back I was visiting a favorite ice-cream shop in Greenwood, IN called "Mrs. Curl" that my family and I really enjoy. There was a sign up in the window asking people to vote for them in a local contest that one of the news agencies puts on every year. As you can see from the image, in order for me to vote for them I would need to enter a very long URL. Being that was out at their location, I was more than likely going to have to do this from my phone, which would add another layer of challenge to the request. In this case, my first thought was to ask myself "Why wouldn't they use a URL shortening service like bit.ly?" The answer would probably have been that nobody there even knew what bit.ly was in the first place. If they'd used something like bit.ly the URL someone would have needed to immediately type into their phone would have been https://bit.ly/1Calux8 instead of https://theindyalist.cityvoter.com/best/ice-cream-shop/specialty-food-and-drink/indianapolis. Or, they could have even customized the URL to https://bit.ly/MrsCurlAlist. Or, they could have even used a big QR code that would have directed people to vote for them by scanning it with their phone. mrs-curl-qrcode

It's sad to say but the majority of society would really always prefer to take the easy way out of a situation. That's perhaps even more true for consumers. As a business, we need to try to identify and alleviate the issues our customers face when doing business with us. The same is true for trying to get them involved with our brands on social media.

Have you really thought about the meaning and power of a "Like" on Facebook or getting someone to follow you on Twitter? Sure it's a great thing to have, more likes and more followers, but when you think about it, it didn't take much effort or commitment from your customer or fan. They were more than likely sitting down and used one finger to click a button on their mouse. Done!

The question though is are they engaged with you and your brand more than that?

Getting customer reviews for your business can be a huge win. That takes significantly more effort on your customer's part than just clicking a mouse button. You need them to go to your website, hopefully within a reasonable amount of time of engaging with you for a reason to even initiate a review, and then write a review for your services. Do they know where to go to leave a review? Would you rather them figure it out for themselves or would you rather direct them to a few of your preferred places for getting a review? Oh, and in case you were wondering, there's other reasons to get customer reviews as well. Remember, before the Internet you'd normally want to hear this kind of feedback anyway. It will either let you know you're doing a good job and you can commend your employees, or you'll find out areas you can improve and your staff may need training.

The point is, whatever you want your customer to do, think about what it takes for them to accomplish that task and try to eliminate any challenges you can. Make it easy, and you may just get them to do something a little more intensive than clicking their mouse on your website.

The results are in for the Indy A-List Voting, and Mrs. Curl finished in the Top 5. It may not have mattered because I'm not sure how close the voting was, but if they'd made it a little simpler for their customers, perhaps they could have pulled out the win!

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Almost Time to Vote

The video above is just one of the reasons I don’t have much support for Barack Obama in this election. I will say that Barack says many things that sound good and are areas that need to be changed. My belief is that he’s not going to be changing much as President because I don’t believe the President of the United States actually has that much power. Most of what’s changed in this country comes from Congress.

A recent article has even now shared that Barack and his own advisors are preparing people to not expect maybe as much change as they were initially promised and the change that does happen may take quite a bit longer than anticipated as well.

How about this (emphasis added by me):

Barack Obama’s senior advisers have drawn up plans to lower expectations for his presidency if he wins next week’s election, amid concerns that many of his euphoric supporters are harboring unrealistic hopes of what he can achieve.

Or from Barack himself:

In an interview with a Colorado radio station, Obama appeared to be engaged already in expectation lowering. Asked about his goals for the first hundred days, he said he would need more time to tackle such big and costly issues as health care reform, global warming and Iraq.

“The first hundred days is going to be important, but it’s probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference,” he said. He has also been reminding crowds in recent days how “hard” it will be to achieve his goals, and that it will take time.

More politics as usual I guess. Overpromise and under-deliver. It seems like they never heard it’s usually better to reverse that pattern.

In conversations yesterday though I stated that what I hope will happen after this election is that the discourse and information about what’s happening in government with opinions from both sides receiving adequate coverage. If Barack wins, I want Republicans, Independents and Democrats being vocal about what’s broken and how they propose to fix it. With emphasis on how to fix it, than just identifying there’s problems. If you can’t propose a solution for the problem, shut-up until you’ve thought about the problem long enough to offer more than just BEWARE!

Voters need to continue to be interested and engaged in what’s going on in this country and not wait for another four years to start paying attention.

Of course that’s just my 2 pennies worth.