California's Easy Voter Guide Project (a project of the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund) is dedicated to making elections make sense; to the ideal that all people should have access to nonpartisan information about the why, how and what of voting and other forms of civic involvement. project of the League of Women Voters of California Education Fund. 
 
The project's downloadable Voter Guide http://www.easyvoter.org/site/evguide/ includes lots of information specific to California voting procedures and state races and propositions, but also an excellent reader-friendly overview of the presdiential election, parties, and candidates. It's available in English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog and Japanese.
 
Other states may have similar projects, but California's is the one I happen to be familiar with. Your state's League of Women Voters website or the national site (http://www.lwv.org) would be a good place to check.

----------------------
Harriet Vardiman Smith
Clearinghouse Project Director
and Interim Acting Center Director
Texas Center for the Advancement of Literacy & Learning
Texas A&M University
Website:  www-tcall.tamu.edu <http://www-tcall.tamu.edu/> 
 
Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe.
-- H. G. Wells (author, historian and utopian)

________________________________

From: povertyracewomen-bounces at nifl.gov on behalf of Daphne Greenberg
Sent: Thu 1/31/2008 10:34 AM
To: povertyracewomen at nifl.gov
Subject: [PovertyRaceWomen 1569] Information about Candidates



Yesterday I was talking to an adult learner about the primaries that will occur in Georgia on Feb. 5th. She shared with me that she is going to wait until the general election to vote, because there are too many candidates and it is too hard for her to figure out what each one stands for. To make matters worse, she added they are all bad.  I asked her what she already knew about the candidates. She told me the following:

Candidate 1- Her husband will get back into the White House and he has poor moral judgement
Candidate 2- His biological father is the type of person that we are at war with
Candidate 3- He ran last time and lost, so he must not be any good
Candidate 4-There is something weird about his religion
Candidate 5-He is too religious
Candidate 6-He has mafia in his family
Candidate 7-He is not good with money

(I left out the names in the above list, because I want to minimize spreading rumors, misinformation, and personal opinions about specific candidates).

I asked her if the elections are being covered in her adult literacy classes and she said no. I asked her why she thought that was so, and she thought that it was because the teachers think that  politics is a taboo subject and does not belong in the adult literacy classroom.

This conversation left me with a whole bunch of questions:

1. Is there a resource for adult learners where they can click on a certain topic (like abortion, same sex marriages, gun control, etc) and read a few sentences written in plain English about each candidate's position?

2. Does coverage of election material belong in the adult literacy classroom?

3. How do we counter rumors and misinformation with groups of people who have difficulty reading?

Any thoughts?

Daphne

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