In the past several months, the Personal Democracy Forum teamed up with YouTube and a host of partner media organizations to enable voters to directly address the candidates. The experiment, called 10Questions, crowd-sourced the most popular questions for each of 46 competitive races in the midterm elections.
Daniel Teweles, VP of Business Development and Marketing at the Personal Democracy Forum, is reasonably pleased with the outcome so far. But there is an appreciable distance left to travel to make the platform relevant.
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“The platform’s lack of penetration in states like North Carolina speaks not just to how engaged a newspaper’s readership was with the midterm elections over the past few months, but also the still new and uncertain coupling of traditional media outlets with online platforms.”
The next steps in this experiment are, first, for users to vote as to whether the candidates actually answered the questions they were given; or did they, as we said before, employ “circumlocutions, legerdemain, spin and talking points.”
The step after that Tewles describes as “huge.”
“We’re finalizing a deal to take 10Questions as a turnkey platform internationally. The idea remains the same wherever our platform is used: the internet can and should be used to further democratize processes and politics.”
A couple of the races that stand out for the candidate’s participation include the race for Senate in California between the Democratic incumbent Barbara Boxer and the Republican challenger, Carly Fiorina. Another is the race for Georgia governor between Republican Nathan Deal and Democrat Roy Barnes.
A couple of responses, one from Fiorina and another from Barnes follow. To vote on whether you think participating candidates answered the questions or not, visit 10Questions.
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