California Voter Foundation encourages online voter education
with new Quick Tips

With American voters increasingly turning to the Internet for election information, the California Voter Foundation has published a new resource to help voter educators meet public demand.

How to Make an Online Voter Guide -- Quick Tips for the Voter Educator is a new publication from the California Voter Foundation (CVF), a nonprofit organization advancing the Internet as a tool for voter education. "We've been publishing our California Online Voter Guide for every statewide election since 1994," said Kim Alexander, CVF's president and founder. "By compiling and sharing what we've learned over the years we hope to promote even more online voter education across the country."

Copies of the Quick Tips have been mailed to election directors in all 50 states, and posted online in HTML and PDF, at:

http://www.calvoter.org/manual/quicktips.html

The Quick Tips cover topics such as how to ensure an online voter guide is nonpartisan, what content to include, and how to design, edit, host and promote an online voter guide. A more detailed manual for how to make an online voter guide will be published by CVF later this year.

Though not every voter will go online seeking election information, millions of US voters already do and the numbers are increasing every year. Nationwide, one in three Americans used the Internet to get information about politics, news and campaigns in 2000, up from one in four in 1998, according to surveys conducted by the Democracy Online Project at George Washington University.

"Educating voters online is both affordable and effective," said Saskia Mills, CVF's executive director and editor of the calvoter.org web site, which has won the prestigious Webby Award and attracts hundreds of thousands of visits each year. "Many election agencies, nonprofits, libraries, universities and news organizations already are developing resources on their web sites that help millions of citizens prepare to vote. Through our Quick Tips we hope to facilitate even more online voter education and help those people working to educate voters online do their work as effectively and affordably as possible."

CVF's Quick Tips publication is funded by a grant from the AOL Time Warner Foundation. More information about the California Voter Foundation is available online at www.calvoter.org.

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This page was first published on August 27, 2002 | Last updated on August 27, 2002
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