My Vote Project
Link to website: Do Vote. Do Complain.
1) For the My Vote project we were asked: “How does our government grow and adapt to changing society?” In order to answer this question we gained first hand experience by participating in a mock election and creating voting materials for the November 4, 2014 Gubernatorial election. My group’s product took the form of a website. In order to make our website as effective as possible we decided to target young Latino voters as our demographic because Latinos are now the majority in California and thus can have a huge impact on the government. In order to appeal to our demographic we created our website in both English and Spanish. In addition we also looked at passed propositions and the process to get a proposition on the ballot. After all of our research we each answered the question in the form of a literacy task (easy).
2) From doing this project I learned that any California citizen can have a proposition placed on the ballot and the process for doing so. It is not that I necessarily thought that all of the propositions were proposed by the legislative body, but that I never paid much attention to the Gubernatorial elections until this project. It turns out that any Californian citizen can have a proposition placed on the ballot by going through one of two processes. The first process is to get a legislator to to bring your proposition to the attention of the legislative body. If that does not work the second option is to get 5% (8% if it is a constitutional amendment) of the people who voted in the last Gubernatorial election to sign a petition stating that they support your proposition. Aside from that I also learned that if the legislative body passed a law that the citizens do not all agree on they can place that law on the ballot for the state to vote on. In addition I learned that Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor through a recall election, meaning that Californians regretted electing Gray Davis as governor and replaced him with the Terminator.
3) One of the most difficult parts of this project was finding unbiased information on the propositions that were in terms that we could understand and teach to others. Yes, you could easily type in “prop #” into google, but that either gives you cites that are very bias or information that is in legal jargon and hard to understand not to mention teach to others. To find good information we had to look at the websites to see who put them up and whether or not they were reliable and unbiased. The first thing we looked for was the ending of the URL, was it a .com, a .org, or were they a .edu or .gov. If it was a .edu or a .gov then the probability that it was unbiased and reliable were really high. If it was a .com or .org we had to dig deeper to see who runs the site and where they stand on the political spectrum.
4) During the course of this project I grew the most in the written communication learning outcome. I grew the most in this outcome because I had the task of translating the entire website into Spanish. Translating anything from one language to another can be difficult because languages are not secret codes that you can easily decode with a key, they are their own separate language with different rules and meanings. For example, in English adjectives come before the noun, but in Spanish adjectives come after the noun. Not all words can be translated from one language to another either, some words, especially words that denote an abstract concept, only have meaning in their respective languages and sometimes only in their respective local culture. In addition even if the words can be translated from one language to another individually they will not always make sense when you try to put them together in a sentence. When translating the website I sometimes had to change the English wording and/or sentence and punctuation in order to be able to translate them into Spanish. However, even though it was a pain to do, I am happy that I did translate the website because it helped me improve my written communication skills and gave me an excuse to write in Spanish.
2) From doing this project I learned that any California citizen can have a proposition placed on the ballot and the process for doing so. It is not that I necessarily thought that all of the propositions were proposed by the legislative body, but that I never paid much attention to the Gubernatorial elections until this project. It turns out that any Californian citizen can have a proposition placed on the ballot by going through one of two processes. The first process is to get a legislator to to bring your proposition to the attention of the legislative body. If that does not work the second option is to get 5% (8% if it is a constitutional amendment) of the people who voted in the last Gubernatorial election to sign a petition stating that they support your proposition. Aside from that I also learned that if the legislative body passed a law that the citizens do not all agree on they can place that law on the ballot for the state to vote on. In addition I learned that Arnold Schwarzenegger was elected governor through a recall election, meaning that Californians regretted electing Gray Davis as governor and replaced him with the Terminator.
3) One of the most difficult parts of this project was finding unbiased information on the propositions that were in terms that we could understand and teach to others. Yes, you could easily type in “prop #” into google, but that either gives you cites that are very bias or information that is in legal jargon and hard to understand not to mention teach to others. To find good information we had to look at the websites to see who put them up and whether or not they were reliable and unbiased. The first thing we looked for was the ending of the URL, was it a .com, a .org, or were they a .edu or .gov. If it was a .edu or a .gov then the probability that it was unbiased and reliable were really high. If it was a .com or .org we had to dig deeper to see who runs the site and where they stand on the political spectrum.
4) During the course of this project I grew the most in the written communication learning outcome. I grew the most in this outcome because I had the task of translating the entire website into Spanish. Translating anything from one language to another can be difficult because languages are not secret codes that you can easily decode with a key, they are their own separate language with different rules and meanings. For example, in English adjectives come before the noun, but in Spanish adjectives come after the noun. Not all words can be translated from one language to another either, some words, especially words that denote an abstract concept, only have meaning in their respective languages and sometimes only in their respective local culture. In addition even if the words can be translated from one language to another individually they will not always make sense when you try to put them together in a sentence. When translating the website I sometimes had to change the English wording and/or sentence and punctuation in order to be able to translate them into Spanish. However, even though it was a pain to do, I am happy that I did translate the website because it helped me improve my written communication skills and gave me an excuse to write in Spanish.