Frustration, Ignorance and a lot of hope: Why we created Votetocracy

We thought it was important to let everyone know why we would create a Votetocracy.com. Well, as many Americans we were frustrated. Frustrated by some of the events of the last year and by our own ignorance around what actually goes on within our government.

Ignorance

I for one was ignorant was ignorant about politics. Shameful as it seems, I was not interested. Partly because it semed confusing and partly because it was and still is hard to know what to believe. Especially when the finger pointing and confusion of an election year kicks in. So I went about learning more. I first found congress.gov. On the site I found gibberish. Terms like "Concurrent House resolution referred to the committee of ways and means". Now, I am a college educated man and had to read that several times before it stuck. Even if citizens wanted to really get involved and find out what is going on in Congress - terms like these would quickly dissuade them from continuing their noble pursuit.

Frustration

How could Washington and Wall Street allow such a crazy situation to occur. We are referring to of course, the housing collapse, sub-prime mortgage crisis and the eventual credit crisis. I. like many Americans took special interest this last election year. During the election year we listened to all the political banter. He said she said, but when she said he was doing that so it can't be true unless he never said it before she did. HUH? We were lost in the maze of poli-speak. So we though... I guess we'll just have to wait and see which of these politicians were going to deliver on the promises they made. And hope that those promises are aligned with what we personally want from our country.

Hope

It needs to be said that we love America. All things considered, this is still the greatest country around. So we are still hopeful about the outcome and future of our country. But we still wondered - what if we didn't have to listen to it all. What if we could just decide for ourselves what we wanted. And tell them what is was we wanted them (the politicians) to do. After all, they work for us right? BINGO! The magic moment! We don't have to wait and see. We CAN tell them want. And so... a few friends sat down and talked about how we could give every citizen the ability to tell thier government what we wanted from them. Sounds like Democracy doesn't it. During this early planning, we decided ona few guiding principles. Here they are:

1. Votetocracy must let citizens know about the bill that are actually being presented in government right now
2. Votetocracy must do this in a way that will make it easy for all citizens to understand
3. Votetocracy must allow citizens to take action by voting for themselves and letting their representatives know how they voted

So we got to work and here we are.