10Questions for 2010: You Ask the Candidates, They Respond

You're probably starting to think about the November 2010 midterm elections now. Have you ever complained about how bad some moderated candidate debates were? Questions that made no sense or had nothing to do with your concerns, or responses that wandered off into set talking points? If you live in one of these 11 states--Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New York, North Carolina, Ohio and Pennsylvania--you can put questions directly to candidates who'll represent you and the people in your district.

Through a partnership with our friends over at the Personal Democracy Forum, MOMocrats.com readers can now ask questions of candidates in our local races via text or video. Here's how 10Questions.com works:

Anyone can post a question (video or text), anyone can vote those up or down (one vote per question per IP address), anyone can embed a question, a race, a state, or the entire country via a fully functional widget, on any website they want. To post or vote on a question, you just need a Google Account, as the site is powered by a souped-up version of the Google Moderator question platform (and for which we are grateful to our technology partners Google and YouTube.) No personal user information is being retained, though the site will allow anyone to view where questions and votes are coming from geographically, and to track the daily up-down voting on any question.

If you live in one of these 11 states, you can urge others to vote up your questions with a click at 10Questions.com through September 21, and then the questions with the highest number of votes will be put to the candidate. They'll issue a video response on October 14 which will be posted on YouTube.

Then, you can vote on and discuss whether or not you thought the candidate answered the question.

This puts you in charge instead of the pundits. Nice change of pace, right?

Cynematic blogs at P i l l o w b o o k.