Take the Ballot Initiative and Check These Election Sites

Election Day is a week from Tuesday. That makes this Cram-for-Elections Week.

Each year, the California ballot seems to get longer, but I still try to make a concerted effort to cast an informed vote. Relying on TV commercials and billboards doesn’t cut it. Instead, I turn to the Web.

The races I care about most are in Congress. Everyone gets to vote for their representative in the House every two years. This year, Californians will also choose a senator.

I know the names of the people who represent me in Washington. But if I didn’t, I could look them up at https://congress.org. Just click on “Find Your Rep,” then type in your ZIP Code and, voila, the site produces the name of your congressional representatives.

My representative is Jim Rogan (R-Glendale), and Congress.org has a link that takes me directly to his home page (https://www.house.gov/rogan). Like most politicians’ home pages, this one includes a sterling biography and photos of his family. But it probably isn’t the best source for objective information.

At Congress.org, there are links to lists compiled by the Federal Election Commission of Rogan’s campaign contributors and how much they gave. (Nearly all of the top contributors are political action committees.) This information can also be obtained from the FEC’s Web site (https://www.fec.gov).

Though Rogan’s Web site includes his voting record going back to 1990, the page for Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) does not. So I went to Congressional Quarterly’s VoteWatch site (https://www.pathfinder.com/CQ/), which touts itself as “your report card to action on Capitol Hill.”

Report card indeed! Just type in your congressional representatives’ names (or get them all at once by entering your ZIP Code) and you get a list of votes going back as far as 18 months. You can winnow the list by choosing votes on selected subjects or on bills with certain keywords in their titles. If you can’t figure out from the title of a bill what it’s about, you’re just a click away from a concise description.

Of course, most of the California ballot is devoted to state offices and propositions--a lot of them. Fortunately, there is a thorough listing at the Democracy Network’s site, https://www.dnet.org/CA/.

DNet has a “candidate grid” for each office, from governor to superintendent of public instruction. Each grid lists all candidates and has links to their position statements on major issues. The gubernatorial grid, for instance, lists seven candidates--five more than I was aware of--and their views on bilingual education, community policing, gun control, tax relief and three strikes, among other issues. There’s even a link for those who want to e-mail their own questions to the candidates.

On a separate page, DNet has put together an overview list of the candidates in each race, with links to their biographies and a list of endorsers, if the candidates chose to make them available. If you missed the gubernatorial debates, you can click to read the transcripts.

DNet is a little thin on the ballot initiatives, with only one-paragraph summaries of each. But the site does link to the official Ballot Pamphlet and Voter Information Guide published by the secretary of state’s office, at https://Vote98.ss.ca.gov. (This is the newsprint booklet that comes in the mail and often gets misplaced before Election Day.) Here you’ll find the highlights of each proposal, the state legislative analyst’s estimate of its financial impact, arguments for and against each measure, and rebuttals to those arguments. The truly hardy can even read the complete text of each ballot measure here.

(While you’re at the secretary of state’s site, you can look up where you’ll go to vote. Just click on “find your polling place,” select your county and type in your address.)

One last piece of information that helps me evaluate candidates and ballot measures is campaign contributions. The contributors to congressional candidates are available at the Center for Responsive Politics’ Web site (https://www.crp.org). There are links to exhaustive lists on each candidate, broken up by industry, issue and even in-state versus out-of-state contributors. To do a direct comparison of rival candidates, click on “1998 Congressional Candidate Profiles” and choose the state and race you’re interested in.

For the money behind the statewide races, I went to the 1998 California Campaign Contribution Database (https://ca98.election.digital.com/), set up by the California Voter Foundation and Compaq’s Network Systems Lab. Here you can call up the donation records for any candidate or ballot measure committee. A summary is also available in an easy-to-read grid.

All this research can certainly be time-consuming. If all you’re looking for is a quick outrage, head straight to the Do It Yourself Congressional Investigation Kit at https://www.crp.org/diykit.

All you have to do is click on an issue--gun control, health care, cable TV rates--to compare campaign contributions to votes in Congress and see if the interests overlap.

*

Times staff writer Karen Kaplan can be reached at karen.kaplan@latimes.com.