You can now find me on wikipedia. As per the instructions of our ambassadors I have refrained from editing the page about TurboVote. I'm arguably a little biased in favor of the project. Eventually, once I get a better sense of the Wikipedia community norms, I would consider writing about the organization and just posting a disclaimer.
TurboVote is all about helping people vote from home. This is normally called absentee voting or voting by mail. I chose to write about the wikipedia page on absentee ballots because the lack of useful information on the page is a great illustration of how hard it is to easily educate oneself about accessing the absentee voting system. The other reason I chose this article is because I have come to accept that I am completely obsessed with absentee voting.
The biggest problem is that the information is not useful to those who would like to vote by mail, there is only information for those casually interested in how the U.S. absentee voting system compares to other countries. I understand that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia, not a "how to" manual, but the site should be a useful resource for readers interested in how their state's system works.
That said, after compiling this information for the past five months I now understand that this is not an easy body of information to collect. The first step involves combing a state's secretary of state website. Not fun. The second step is doing that fifty times. The third step involves designing the display of this information so that interested people can enrich this basic information with news articles and papers. This type of task would seem overwhelming if it wasn't also perfectly suited for Wikipedians.
The next hurdle is that this information, once collected, is difficult to present in an easily readable format. For example, I'm unsure if it is better to create an absentee ballot page for every state or to create one page that would list all 50 state absentee ballot rules and regulations.
Not only is there a lot of information about absentee voting, it is always shifting. An article like this requires a community of writers to take care of it. Unfortunately, there doesn't seem to be anybody on Wikipedia who cares about this article. So sad. My evidence is that there is only one unanswered comment/question on the discussion page. One person asks, "how many adsentee ballot are esued to over seas???" (sic). It's the sort of information that many people might find interesting and which changes every election cycle. Yet because the Wikipedia community often follows the creation of an article, it's possible that this problem can be solved by shaking things up on the page.
How to shake things up? I decided to create a table. It's an easy way to display information about every state on a single page and will help people quickly compare information across states. Now to see if anyone will help me start filling it in.
This is what I created:
====State Rules on Absentee Voting====
{|border="1" cellpadding="5"
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! scope="col" | State
! scope="col" | No Excuse Necessary
! scope="col" | Permanent Absentee
! scope="col" | Can Request Absentee Ballot Online
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|AL
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|AL
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|AK
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|AZ
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|AR
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|CA
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|CO
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|CT
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|DE
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|DC
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|FL
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|GA
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|HI
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|ID
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|IL
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|IN
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|IA
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|KS
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|KY
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|LA
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|ME
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|MD
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|MA
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|MI
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|MN
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|MS
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|MO
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|MT
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|NE
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|NV
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|NH
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|NJ
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|NM
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|NY
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|NC
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|ND
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|OH
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|OK
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|OR
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|PA
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|RI
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|SC
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|SD
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|TN
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|TX
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|UT
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|VT
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|VA
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|WA
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|WV
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|WI
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|WY
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