So here’s the question:

Do you vote for Joseph Dovinh or Jerry Patterson for Coast Community College District Governing Board Member, Trustee Area 2 in the 2008 election?  …. ok I need to take a nap after typing that.

More often than not, most of these local candidates have VERY LITTLE information about themselves online. Some don’t even have websites.  Of course, the first place I went to search for information was Google.  So I typed in “Joseph Dovinh“.  The first listing was some random site called Pipl that was completely useless.

UPDATE: The sites I mentioned in this article and their rankings have changed. Why? Because THIS article is now ranked #1.  Go figure.  Way to go Google!

The second site was a site called “thevoterguide.org” that didn’t have any information on either candidate… in fact, there was more information on the BALLOT than that site provided.  At least on the ballot I can see what their profession is.

The third site was a wordpress.com subdomain that had an article which contained two sentences about Joseph Dovinh.

If I continue down the page, I find redcounty.com that has an article on Duplicate Office Runners in which it mentions that Joseph Dovinh is also running for Midway City Sanitary District.  Again, I’m just looking for any information on the guy and his opponent and what they believe in.

Of course there is no information about him on votesmart.org either.  And in fact many of the candidates they do have listed have incomplete information.

So I continued down the Google search results for “Joseph Dovinh” and found something on the bottom of the first page that looked promising.  It was a site titled “votedovinh.com”  This was his personal website (hosted on Yahoo).  I was really disappointed with the layout and organization of the site.  It looks like a high school web project.  But there was a prepared statement from Joseph and after a lengthy read I was finally able to get some sense of what his beliefs are as he talks about his fear of the increasing influence of communist countries in our education system.  I suppose there is more truth than we might believe since Republicans and Democrats are globalizing and socializing our country while also striping our Constitutional rights and liberties from us “for our own good”.  Sounds like there is a significant communist influence in this country already.

I am pretty surprised that Joseph Dovinh didn’t talk about his opponent on his site or even MENTION that he was running for office.  There was no donation button. There was nothing to compare him to Jerry Patterson who is currently the Governing Board Member of Coast Community College District. I’m surprised that his site almost didn’t even rank on the first page for his OWN NAME (update: it has jumped to #3 on the first page at least, but it is still a crappy site. lol ).

Candidates had better understand and get with the program when it comes to online marketing in politics because even voters who attempt to make an informed decision are finding it hard to get the information they need.  It doesn’t take much to organize and design a decent website.  Heck, even a free template from Wordpress would be better than most of these political websites.  If a candidate can’t take the time to write down and organize the issues for someone they want a vote from, why do they deserve my vote?  In fact I’ve spent more time writing this article than they did on their entire website!

In the end, for many of these candidates that have little or NO information available, voters will be left with a simple choice.

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