Voting Season
It’s a major election year, and while the outcomes are a mystery, we can all be informed voters. There is still plenty of time to register for the PA primaries.
VOTING RESOURCES
- alleghenyvotes.com — Allegheny County’s site for:
- registration,
- absentee ballots (now able to place request online),
- new voting machine demonstrations, and more
- votesPA.com — Pennsylvania’s site for:
- registration,
- finding your polling place,
- absentee ballots, and more
- vote411.org — by the League of Women Voters for:
- Candidate information,
- ballot information, and more,
NEWS SOURCES
Finding good information can be a challenge, but there are reliable news sources. No, facebook is not one of these! eLibrary’s Opposing Viewpoints in Context database is very clear about the origins of its results, and it compiles results on many current topics.
Sites such as factcheck.org and even Snopes have never-ending streams of information to evaluate. Another tool is ad fontes media Interactive Media Bias Chart. It uses a methodology to rate overall reliability and political bias for many news outlets so that you can consider the source.
A recent article in The Atlantic (The 2020 Disinformation War) is food for thought. Based on the Media Bias chart, one would expect this article to be fairly reliable and only somewhat biased to the left. Individual articles may vary, of course. It would be interesting to see how the same underlying story components would be treated by sites rated as unreliable and skewing to extreme political opposites, say, NewsPunch and Wonkette. For more reliable results, search Opposing Viewpoints in Context for terms such as ‘election 2020’.
Christy @ Carnegie Library of McKeesport