About Smart Voter

Designed to help voters understand their choices better -- especially for local races, Smart Voter offers extensive background information on many candidates in six counties in California for the June '98 primary election. Joining Santa Clara and San Mateo counties, which Smart Voter served in the previous two elections are: Humboldt, Kern, Marin, and Orange counties. .

How this information was gathered

The underlying information required to generate personalized ballots was gathered from the Registrars of Voters of each of the participating counties. The Registrars and the Secretary of State also provided the official data about races and measures. See the Project Disclaimer for more information.

Every candidate in the June 2 elections in the participating counties was invited to participate. All information about candidates was gathered from the candidates themselves either by entering the data on a web form or by filling out a hard copy form and mailing it to us.

The Registrar of Voters in each of the participating counties provided the official data about races and measures as well as the data we needed to provide polling place location and ballot content based on voter's address.

Message to Candidates

Your free web page

If you are a candidate in a nonparticipating county, we regret that we cannot post any information about your race or your candidacy.

Candidates may enter data on their web page electronically until 6:00 a.m. PDT, Tuesday, June 2, 1998.

For answers to specific questions, please contact the Smart Voter Project Director, Trudell Een, at trudelleen@aol.com or 408-323-9426.

Candidate photo

To submit a black & white or color photo, either:

• Mail a nonreturnable photo to

  League of Women Voters
  Smart Voter Project/Photograph
  97 Hillview Avenue
  Los Altos CA 94022

• Inform us of the URL of your digital photo and we will attempt to alter it to our specifications. If the photo does not already meet our specifications, we do not commit to using this image although we will attempt to alter it.

• Attach the digital photo with the following specifications and send via email. Specifications: 107 x 130 pixels; JPG format; less than 10K in byte size. Send to our Photo Editor at carol@smartvoter.org.

We reserve the right to crop or reduce photos in order to meet our requirements.

Unique Collaboration

Smart Voter is the result of a unique collaboration between government, nonprofit organizations, and media. The Smart Voter Project Team, led by the League of Women Voters, coordinated the project based on technology and procedures originally developed by Smart Valley, Inc for the November 1996 election.

The League of Women Voters of California authorized a steering committee of League members who designed the project, hired a project manager and programmer/webmaster, coordinated the volunteer effort to gather information from candidates, and worked with project partners to publicize and add content to the site supporting the November 1997 and June 1998 elections.

We thank the following Registrars of Voters for working with us to incorporate their address and ballot data into our web site:

• Lindsey McWilliams, Humboldt County
• Norm Briggs, Kern County
• Howard Hanson, Marin County
• Rosalyn Lever, Orange County
• Warren Slocum, San Mateo County
• Dwight Beattie, Santa Clara County

Key Features

The Smart Voter site allows users to find their custom ballot and polling place by entering their street address and zip code. Users may access "home pages" of each participating candidate that include their biography, endorsements, top priorities if elected, and position papers. Every candidate in the June 2 elections in the participating counties was invited to participate. The Contest "home pages" include links to relevant news or analysis articles written by online local media organizations.

The League of Women Voters Education Fund

This site is sponsored by the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund, a nonpartisan public policy educational organization, which:

• Builds citizen participation in the democratic process.
• Studies key community issues at all government levels in an unbiased manner.
• Enables people to seek positive solutions to public policy issues through education and conflict management.