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Tuesday May 7th is primary election day in Indiana which is only six weeks away.

>> Meanwhile the deadline for voter registration for the primary election is April 8th which is just two weeks away.

>> Do you know how to register, where to vote, who the candidates and the issues are?

>> Well, the answers to these and other election questions can be found on a Web site developed by the League of Women Voters and we'll learn more about vote for one one dot org on this week's prime time.

>> And good evening Ibru since our guests today are Karen Eller.

She is vice president Voter Services and Sandy Junk who is vote for one one chair both ladies are with the League of Women Voters and we'd like to add that the League of Women Voters Fort Wayne by connection and we also would like you to connect and join the conversation with your questions and comments.

>> Just call the number that you see on the screen and Karen.

Sandy , welcome back.

Actually and good to have you with us.

>> Thank you.

Thank you for having us.

We're discussing the importance of nonpartisan information and have it be readily available and when that means computer it means information can sometimes change in an instant.

>> You need to be sure you adapt to it and no better example even before we get to vote for one.

One dog was finding a little sidebar about how to register and if we can share that when you go to vote for one one do you get to a particular slide and it talks about being able to be sure that it's accomplished by April 8th if we can show that graphic that would be awesome.

There we go.

And in the lower left corner it describes the online deadline for midnight April 8th.

The third bullet point bears a little enlarging.

Let's enlarge it to show what that last bullet point says.

You can register in person April 8th unless the county clerk is closed for the eclipse and that's great.

>> You won't find that in too many primary elections but this is the importance of the immediacy of it and having a way forward and we just want to make sure that people register before the age so you can do it way before I don't let the eclipse stand in your way.

>> Yes.

And that nation truly is a part of vote for one one and let's share what that homepage looks like as this may be the thing that greets your computer as we move through that is close.

We'll hang on to that that shot in just a moment.

>> But tell us first of all vote for one one dog.

This has been with us for a while but for some it might be totally new.

>> Yeah.

So this is our nonpartisan website for the League of Women Voters.

It's actually a national organization but we have one that's it's Wheatly that the the Fort Wayne one.

>> So we have candidates for the local issues here that we reach out to.

So on this website you can do lots of things.

You can register to vote, check your voting status, check your polling place, all that good stuff year round.

But when it gets into primary season and then the general election season, what we've done is we have our vote for one one committee and we come up with questions for each of the candidates.

>> We ask them three to four questions where they stand on important issues.

>> We send those surveys out to them.

We ask them to respond.

They send them back and we upload that information into the website.

It is unedited so we can't make changes anything they say it would super about it too is when you have two , three or four candidates running like you might have in the primary, you can see all their responses side by side to those questions and this is where that notion of the site being a one stop shop kind of comes from.

I assume because other descriptors have called a source forum a platform but it is a go to because not all of us are able to retain from one election the experience to the next right.

>> Where is my polling place and those can move right?

Oh yeah.

Those does move frequently a lot when we do tabling events I hear many times oh I voted in the same place for the past twenty years and that may be true but polling places do change all the time and I have found to with the polling places and when I have volunteered on Election Day is people don't understand with the early voting there's four or five locations you can go to throughout the city for the early voting.

Well on election Day you have to go to your particular polling place on Election Day.

So I think that's also good information to get out there and if you're not quite sure where it is, you can go in to vote for one one to find out exactly where that polling location is.

>> Let's let's go to the philosophical reason the logistics exist.

>> What do you hope to accomplsh with vote for one one?

Both of you weigh in on that.

Well, I feel like vote for one one is has two primary goals.

One is to give you the tactical information am I registered to vote?

Where is my polling location?

The other is the educational component who is on my ballot and so when you go in to vote for one one and you put your your address in there, it will pull up your particular ballot and the people who are on your ballot, all of the people on your ballot and then like Sandy was saying, you can compare them side to side and see the answers to the questions that we ask.

You can also do a deeper dove into their their platform so it's everything consolidated in one place so that when you go into your poll whether you choose to vote early or whether you choose to vote on Election Day, you're not surprised by who's on there.

You're like Oh I didn't know we were voting for judges in this election or I didn't know who was running for county council.

You know that in advance when you go to vote for one one and I think about the importance of resources of this nature that are helping to perhaps empower turnout given how many turnout I think there was the statistics back in twenty twenty that I only had a twenty three percent registered voter turnout that's four out of ten.

Yeah yeah.

For the primary election.

And if you think about that that means for people out of ten showing up for the primary picked who is going to be on your ballot for the general election.

So if you don't show up for that primary you're kind of taking those choices away from yourself.

>> You know, I was I heard someone say this the other day and I couldn't agree more.

They said that voting in the primary was the single most powerful act you have as a citizen and because you are helping determine who is going to be on that ballot in the general election.

>> And just for perspective, we're not the only ones who have struggled to get our primary numbers up in twenty twenty ten percent of the voters selected eighty three percent of the U.S. House of Representatives.

So just to give to play that out across the country, that's how much power those primary voters have.

And so for anyone who thinks their vote doesn't matter, it absolutely does in the primary for sure and in the general election both of them wow.

>> We're receiving a question from Leon who is calling offline and you're welcome to do that.

Well, if you'd like to join us live, we're happy to put you through if you'd like to share your question, it's appearing on the screen as we speak and Leon wants to know how important is it to check your voter registration card and I.D prior to voting?

>> Oh, I would always check that Indiana does purge their does purge voter rolls.

So I think it's always a good idea to check to make sure that you're still registered and that you're registered at the correct address because your ballot could change based on where you live.

So it's a good idea to keep that updated and if you do go to the vote for one on one site, you can do all those things right inside that that website.

>> Yeah, I'm sure it may be more anecdotal or perhaps just harder to get a numeric with that goes with this.

But to the extent that these sites help empower people when they go, can voting be intimidating and that knowledge in this case is power.

>> I think one of the things like when I'm out talking to voters so this is anecdotal evidence not not a statistical data study that I did but when I'm talking to voters I think one of the main hesitations when they're in whether they choose to vote is that they don't want to vote against someone that they don't know who is or vote for someone who they don't know who is they're more afraid of doing something that does not reflect their values then and the process can be really overwhelming there.

There are a lot of candidates on this primary ballot coming up and so trying to sift through that and we are all really busy.

>> I don't have time to like look through everything.

So I think that if we can take some of the work out of figuring out who's there, some of the work out of figuring out a little bit about getting to know who they are, then that empowers voters to go into the voting booth and say OK, I feel OK about this.

>> I at least knew who was going to be here.

I'm going to align with these candidaes this time and all the more reason to have this empowerment because Indiana's in a place where hasn't been before as far as incumbency, right?

>> Yeah.

I've had some friends tell me like oh maybe I'm not going to vote because the presidential elections already decided and I could not disagree more.

I think that this primary election is pivotal.

I think they're all important to vote in.

But there's two really important seats coming up that haven't had that.

There's no incumbent running and that is governor and US House District three and you will see when you pull up your sample ballot and pricing the TV ads and all those things, there are a lot of people running for those seats.

So you have a lot of power right now to get the person that you might choose to be on the on the general election ticket.

And that's an exciting time for Indiana because those seats once people get in them they tend to stay in them for a while.

So the fact that they're both open right now is really an important thing for Indiana right now.

>> One point of guidance we should share is that as we are communicating all of this through the show tonight, the site itself is in final makeup call right, right.

>> Right.

Yeah, that's a good point.

When we run through the video later I'll probably mention a couple of times but the vote for one on one site will go live with the candidate responses definitely by April 1st we're targeting the end of March but definitely by April 1st we'll have that live so we'll have the candidate responses in there.

You could go in now and make sure that you're still registered to vote and your polling place and do that.

But the candidate responses to be up there by April 1st for sure, which is another key reason why vote for one one dog should at least be on the list of sites that you visit in your own collection of information as opposed to what could be informtive but certainly agree to research task to go to each candidate's website.

>> Mm hmm.

Yeah.

I mean we they put a lot of by biographical information on their website which is great.

But what I want to get across specificlly is the four one one and the League of Women Voters is we are a nonpartisan organization so we spent hours our committee of four or five going through questions to ask these candidates and making sure that our biases are not put into those and really we even reached out to a member she isn't a member of the League of Women Voters but she's part of the Republican Party and we just we even asked her like can you run through our questions and what do you what do you think about the questions that we're asking?

And she had a lot of great feedback for us that that we utilized in the questions that we sent out.

>> Well, yeah.

Well let's go ahead and take the tour, OK?

>> We'll track Carson and let's see how one navigates through the vote for one one dot org site and let's start with the see here.

>> All right.

So I will tell you just this is our preview site.

We videoed this a few weeks ago so this will look a little different.

But for the most part you'll find all these screens look familiar.

>> The first thing you want to do is put in your address for today we're using the library's address but it's important for viewers you can put in your own personal address and then you're going to click start ballot and this is the primary, remember?

So you're going to pick Republican or Democrat ballot that you choose for today we're going to use Republican and it takes you right into the very first race that that's on there.

And if you see in the right corner there's an arrow and you can just go through each of the races that way or if you're maybe looking for a specific race you can go to view ballot and then you've got your whole list of races that you can look at and today we're going to look at the county commissioner race.

>> Now we did video this a few weeks ago.

We didn't have a lot of responses but we were really pleased that these two had responded.

>> So we use them as a sample.

You can see their biographical information in there and then if you scroll down further, this is the heart vote for one one.

These are the questions we asked each of the candidates and you can see their responses side by side so you can review them at your leisure before you go vote and then you can choose the candidate in there that that resonates with you.

So we click the candidate and it automatically goes to the next race so you can click through each of them, read them.

>> You can even go back if you want to look at the last race you looked at and then we're going to go to the District three race because this goes to our point that we were talking about earlier there are so many people running for this race so you have lots of options to choose from now again we don't have all the responses when we go live by April 1st you'll have lots more to choose from but we do have Mr. Felker responded.

So we've got his biographical information and then we have the responses to his questions.

>> A fun thing we did with District three is we gave them the option to upload a two to three minute video why they would be the best candidate for the job.

So we're really hoping that they take advantage of that offer and then you can just click that compare button and look at side by side.

>> So very much like like the other one you can go down, choose your candidate and again it takes you to write to the next race and if you think you're done, go back to your view, your ballot you've got you can see the folks we chose and then finish ballot and then this is another great feature a vote for one one you can put in your phone number or email address and when you selected those candidates it will text it right to your phone.

So you'll have that information handy for you especially if you're looking at the website two or three weeks before you go vote and there were so many there you don't have to go back and think oh, who was it that I like to get that I wanted to pick?

>> You'll have that information take it to the voting booth.

You're in and out and on with the rest of your day.

What kind of feedback have you received as you've been sharing information about the vote for one one dog site as far as that idea of being able to compare and contrast valuate and really have time to ponder over it all?

>> I guess this is the most exciting thing to talk to voters about it really is I'm not exaggerating when when we tell people that they can one stop shopping at vote for one one like oh thank goodness something finally exists like this and that is repeated over and over at all the tables we are registering voters at it is a universal response and it's also very leveling.

>> I think that everyone who wants to engage in in our civic process wants to make good decisions and so we're like look, our sign outside our table says we don't care who you vote for just that you do.

And I think that's absolutely true and that's what we try to drive home with this site.

One thing I we haven't brought up yet is that and I notice this because I was on vote forgotten about how we have a description of each of the candidates positions and what they do on there.

So I think that's another thing that's good to know who these people are and what level of government they're serving at and what their job is.

So in addition to thepspecificie candidates, there's also a description of the position that they are running for now we've mentioned different websites to visit in preparation for having as much information as that comfort level rises with the level of information heading into the booth.

But along with vote for an underdog is the league of Women Voters Fort Wayne site.

>> Yes, the L w Ivy League of Women Voters F.W.

Fort Wayne Dog site and we have a tour of of it.

of that if if we could at this time and take it away.

Yeah.

So this is our League of Women Voters Fort Wayne website so this is different than vote for one one which actually took me a little while to get used to when I was a new member.

But if you go to this website we have a ton of voting resources that you could look at.

I think she kind of goes through each of the things we have but we have teacher toolkits you can use.

There's information for new voters that might be maybe overwhelmed by the process of doing it.

There's information I think that links you to the election board so you could also get registered to vote and do that.

It's very informative.

It will go into we've got information on redistricting that you can do on our home page .

There's really some really great links that you can look at and it'll just kind of tell you like when our next meeting is because everyone's welcome at our meetings what volunteer opportunities that we might have available.

You don't have to be a League of Women Voters.

Remember to come out and table with us at an event and there is also information that you can find on there about how to become a member of the league of Women Voters.

>> And so with all this information you can have all the maps in the world but navigating with all that map show is is an art and as much as science.

So share with us, Karen how one navigates the voting process armed and ready to go.

>> Well, this is a good first stop and I feel like your viewing viewing office audience here is probably well versed in and getting out to vote.

I think that what we found is as the league and as studies that have been shown is that having a voting plan ensures that people vote.

So when am I going to vote?

Where am I going to vote?

What time setting a meeting request for your calendar so you get out and do it.

Are you voting early?

Are you voting on Election Day?

It doesn't matter.

Just make a choice and make sure you block the time out.

>> We encourage people to vote early because things come up you don't know what's happening and you know something might come up on Election Day.

>> There could be yeah.

So we encourage people to vote early especially because it allows for some flexibility on where you're voting.

There are more options.

Maybe you're at work and it's easier to to choose the satellite office that's closer to you.

Some of them are open until 8:00 p.m. the week before the election and so maybe it's better to vote later at night or you know, those kinds of things.

So having a voting plan is really important.

Also important to know is what to bring with you, which is a government issued ID that has a photo and an expiration date.

>> Those are very important things.

People often bring their driver's license and that's the most common thing to bring.

And then the other thing to know is to bring your vote for one on candidates and so you don't get in there and start to panic because you don't know who's on your ballot.

But when you get into the voting booth just making sure that you take time to go through all the pages and answer all the questions, sometimes we can rush through and just be ready to go and I we have both worked the polls in addition to helping support education so we know what it can be like and a lot of times people walk out of their voting booth without hitting that final button.

So you're like don't forget to hit the button.

>> So we have to make sure that just following that process is important if there is vote, if you can't make it to the polls.

>> I think that's another important thing to talk about too.

Which are you are you needing to vote absentee?

Are you not going to be in town?

Are you a college student?

Can you not make it to the polls in which case there's another process to do that and the the league website and the League of Women Voters and the election board are all here to help support people who need to vote by mail.

>> This is certainly the the lighthouse landmark Peace Online with vote four on one dog.

But there are other activities and opportunities to connect with the League of Women Voters Fort Wayne , let me ask you both in what time we have left.

>> What else do you do?

We do a lot of tabling events around the community.

You will find us four or five times throughout the summer months at the Y Eleni Farmers Market will go basically any place somebody will let us go.

Many of the community fairs that go on we'll have a table set up.

We really like to connect with the community as much as ppossible and even if there's folks out there today that's running a nonprofit church member something that that might want someone to come in and talk for five or ten minutes about voting or getting voters registered all the League of Women Voters members are happy to do that, make time in our schedule to come and meet with you.

>> So if there's anybody out there, this is our plug that we would love to get together and make that work.

>> We did a voter summit a couple weeks ago with other community members and we just just trying to get over those obstacles, find out what the obstacles are in people in attendance and people showing up to vote.

So we are out there in the community and looking to partner with with organizations and just before we went on air we were talking about the importance of educating voters on the voting process and the importance of the primary.

>> Yeah, I feel like the primary is can be a tough one for folks who haven't maybe been through the process before.

So I think that recognizing that Indiana has a has a partially open primary which means that when you register to vote you don't declare your party on your voter registration when you go to the primary they're going to ask you to pick a Democratic or Republican ballot and when you get there you're going to take that ballot and you're going to vote for that party for that primary and you're going to determine for that for that party which candidates you think should be on that ballot in the general election.

So people aren't trying to get into your business by asking you to pick a pick a ticket.

You that is your job in the primary is to pick your ticket.

You're Democratic or Republican ticket and and make those choices.

>> We have several different websites and information Ginde and we want to share those in an orderly way so you can write them down.

Here we go.

First of all, you can note that Instagram and Facebook are outlets for the League of Women Voters Fort Wayne and your Google machines will help you get to that information.

>> The League of Women Voters Fort Wayne Web site yes.

Is a great Malph exercise lwr VFW dot o r g and that is the one that again has complimentary information to vote for one one and four one one dog you type it just like we've been saying it and again the curtain goes up on the website roughly definitely by April 1st the hope is by March twenty eighth but I know I know for sure I think Easter might interfere with that but we know definitely by April 1st we'll have that up and ready to go a full week before early voting opens.

>> Well and just like the the website I'm sorry just like the general election and how to register that time is going to come it well well like we started working on this back in January and it just seems so far away and now we're we're right here ready to go.

>> Elections in the mirror are closer than they appear.

Thanks this evening to Karen L'A, vice president of Voter Services and City Chunk who is chair of Vote for one one.

Good luck ladies as we move to the primary.

Thank you for watching as well.

For everyone with prime time, I'm Bruce Haines.

Take care.

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