Department of Communication

University of Washington

Research the candidates for high-level political offices in the United States to see whether they have a website. You will be assigned a state, and must enter basic information about the candidate into a database. Download this empty excel spreadsheet, and use it to build your catalogue of candidates and URL. Here is an example of what the finished spreadsheet for Washington State looks like.

Candidate activity varies from state to state. Some states are electing a new governor, some are not. Some states are electing new senators, others are not. Some states have many candidates for the House of Representatives in Washington DC, other states only have a few candidates. Most candidates will have a website, but some will not. All in all, you will probably have 25-30 candidates running for high-level offices in your state. Not all of them will have campaign websites.

A candidate website is content at a specific domain name that was clearly produced or sponsored by the official candidate campaign organization. For example, in Washington the Attorney General is running for Governor. Her office has an official website on a government server (http://www.atg.wa.gov/). Public officials are not allowed to use government resources for campaigning, so this is not her campaign website. Her campaign website has a unique URL (http://www.gregoire2004.com/). Party websites that devote a page to a candidate do not count. Websites that are under construction should be labeled as such. The candidate’s name should appear in the basic domain name of the website.

Note we are only interested in candidates for State Governor, and candidates for federal level Senate and House of Representatives in Washington DC. You will not be given points for candidates running for state senate or state house of representatives. If you report a website ending in *.gov, you will not be given points for that entry because it is not considered a campaign website. There are two or three students assigned to each state, so we will be able to do a comparative analysis of your findings, and there will be a presentation of your findings in a couple of weeks.

Assignment Goals. First, this assignment will help you practice manipulating spreadsheets and data. Second, this assignment will let you exercise your use of Boolean operators in online searches and in the library databases. Third, this assignment will involve you in a larger public scholarship project at www.campaignaudit.org.

Assignment Grading. This assignment is due at midnight on Friday, October 15^th, and is worth 20 points towards your final grade. You must submit your spreadsheet using the E-submit system. Label your spreadsheet last name, first initial, underscore, and two letter state abbreviation. Amoshaun Toft, who prepared the example spreadsheet, labeled his “tofta_wa.xls” because he did the Washington case study.