Ohio November 2014 Ballot Information - Candidates and Local Issues

Check out the League of Women Voters site for your state to get local candidate & issues information! 

 

It's mid-October and it's long past time I educated myself on all the candidates who are running
this November, not just the Governor's race and a few other familiar candidates for office.

The sad part is that it took a very bad a campaign commercial to make me realize that I'm behind on researching candidates. It seems David Pepper is doing the usual failing upwards bit and challenging Mike DeWine for Attorney General of Ohio. Good Lord - are these really my choices? With options like these we need a "No Confidence" option.

In every election year since pretty much the Internet, I've been using the League of Women Voter's website to educate myself on candidates and issues.

I couldn't find the information for the Ohio 2014 November Election on the old Smart Voter website. Now I see that LWV Ohio has a new fancy setup, but  to me it's a bit creepy because they require your exact address to get voting info where before they used to only ask for your zip code. And they do not explain at all what they do with this info or make their privacy policy plain. I called them and the lady who answered the phone put me on hold briefly and then she said she asked their Executive Director, who assured her that the info is used only to personalize ballot info and that's it. I really hope so, but it would be nice to have that in writing on the site.

At any rate, I decided I better get busy researching the rest of the candidates, and not feeling comfortable with the LWVO, I did a Google search for Ohio Ballot Information and turned up the Ohio Secretary of State John Husted's "Whats On the Ballot" website with information on General Election Candidates and Local Issues.

If I didn't know any better, I'd say they really don't much care about people having this information. The downloads they have with lists of who's running are only available as badly formatted Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. I wouldn't use them for my college homework let alone for an official website that's supposed to inform voters about their candidates. It's really pathetic. I'm appreciating LWVO a lot more about right now.

I took the liberty of cleaning up the spreadsheets a bit and making them into PDF's that can be viewed  and also downloaded at the following links.

Ohio November 2014 Candidates
PDF View or Download (13 Pages Letter Size)

Ohio November 2014 Local Ballot Issues
PDF View or Download (50 Pages Legal Size)

Seriously, if I can do it, you'd think the Secretary of State could hire someone who could do that as well. At any rate, here's the basic info about who's running in Ohio and local issues. I guess we'll have to do the rest of the research on each candidate ourselves. Or you can go to the League of Women Voter's website for your state and trust that they only have good intentions with your address.

Either way, get informed and get out and vote.