Scorecards

When the time comes to evaluate candidates in preparation to cast your vote, wouldn’t it be nice to have a collection of reliable information at your fingertips to help you make an informed decision? That, in a nutshell, is what a scorecard does. Maybe you care deeply about the Constitutional right to keep an bear arms as a means of defending your liberty and deterring tyranny. Well, you can go to the NRA’s online scorecards and see what they have to say about the politicians they have on record. And what if you care deeply about the life of the unborn, and want to understand the candidates position on Right-to-Life and abortion issues? Then there’s Ballotpedia, Heritage Foundation, Conservative Review, American Family Association, and many more. So, you can spend a great deal of time searching out the scorecards that will show you the record, activities, and statements of the candidates for that as well. And this can go on and on, issue after issue, and candidate after candidate.

Liberty Contenders aims to create an “LCAS” (Liberty Contender Aggregate Score) by consolidating many of the most popular existing scorecards. What’s more, we will give you the ability to drill into the component sources so everything you need to make an informed decision across all of the issues you care about will be at your fingertips – in one place. In addition, the Liberty Contenders platform will apply your personal values – that you define in your profile – to create a personalized weighted score alongside the score that is generated by our algorithm. That way two people who agree on most issues but disagree on one are each uniquely served by the same scoring system. Our system will also present an “OAS” (Opposition Aggregate Score) that behaves in much the same way. The difference here is that it will use scorecards from ideologically-opposed organizations. Of course the desired result in this case would be a lower composite score. This is because, understandably, to the extent that a good candidate opposes our opposition, that opposition will regard them in a negative light, and their scorecards will reflect that.

For new candidates without a record, the system will provide you with the ability to see endorsements and comments (whether positive or negative) from prominent figures. As for the judiciary, prior decisions will be made available, along with endorsements and comments from prominent figures. Beyond this, the system’s Issue Forums will provide users with the ability to create and engage in threaded discussions about particular candidates.

That describes the vision of the Scorecards function of the platform. And as with every function of the system, it can be filtered to see scorecards of candidates at the local, state, or national level.