About DecaturVote.com

DecaturVote.com is a for-purpose business legally organized for-profit. I want to bring local voter information to the forefront, making it accessible & easy to follow. I've been working toward this on and off for a few years and have dedicated my full-time work to this since November 2021.

A huge motivation for this site is the Municipal 2021 election, on which there were almost no news articles - one in Decatur Tribune & (if memory serves) one in Decatur Herald & Review. And they had very little information.

Furthermore, there were 72,880 registered voters for the Macon County 2021 Municipal election, but only 8,963 people, or 12.30% actually voted for city council members, according to the election results. For contrast, in the 2020 there were 72049 registered voters & 49,390 people voted for President, or about 68.6% according to the election results

Local Elections are important & our vote has more impact than in state and federal elections. You can email our city councilors, county board members, and other local elected officials and often get a reply written BY the elected official. You can attend meetings and speak your opinion.

And they (local officials) are in charge of significant budgets (about $70 million for City of Decatur) and local legislation that affect our day-to-day lives.

Bias & Partisanship

I intend this site to be unbiased & non-partisan. However, I have biases & am a leftist. You may have preconceptions about what leftism is, but please do not jump to conclusions about me based on that label & instead judge the content I put on the site. While I have some very strong opinions, I would rather put out information fairly & allow the public to figure out what's best. I don't want to hold power over local politics, so I will try not to be partisan in the core mission of this site.

This means I will try to keep candidate pages & Q/A unbiased - just sharing what the politicians want to share. However, my news articles may include more bias as these are personal journalism and are not the core mission of the site.

Moderation

Honestly, I don't know how I'm going to handle moderation. For example, I want to ban COVID misinformation, but I don't want to hide a candidate's views, even if they are wrong. I want to ban baseless claims and require citations, but then it would be up to me to decide what is 'baseless'. I want to force content from candidates to be policy-focused rather than being heavy with talking points, but then I'm limiting how candidates can communicate information.

I will say that free speech is not guaranteed on this site. I am not the government. This is a private business & I'm in charge of what goes on the site. My moderation, design decisions, and content choices are a big part of what makes this site valuable.

So, I don't know how I'll handle moderation, and I will figure this out in time, with practice and feedback, and I will likely make mistakes along the way.

Plans

At launch, I intend to cover a limited amount of local political information: All local offices, local candidates, and a Question/Answer section for candidates to share more information. I will also be writing the occasional news article about local politics.

Provided I find success and the business grows, i would like to cover a more significant amount of local news by employing full-time journalists. In time, I would like to transition to a not-for-profit corporation with extremely strict bylaws to prevent greed as can be seen in other NFPs that pay CEOs multiple millions of dollars. Or if it stays for-profit, I'd like to transition to worker-owned. Time will tell.

And once things are running smoothly for Decatur, I am excited to release this website's software as open source, releasing the software for free. Then I would like to work in nearby communities to foster development of another site like this one for Bloomington, Springfield, Champaign, and eventually I hope for this software (or at least the idea) to spread nationwide. I have no interest in profits from these other operations I'll help foster.

Monetization

Unfortunately, I need to make money to live. I'd love to do this all for free without any revenue goals, but then I would not be able to sustain development of this site. Up to this point, I've had a tremendous amount of support (housing) to get me started, but going forward I need to make a wage.

My primary source of income will be from subscribers, with the primary subscription costing $10 per month. Subscribing gives you access to requesting new features, participating in weekly live streams, submitting questions for candidates (which will be reviewed by me, so not all questions will be asked), and possibly more.

I will also offer a sponsors program for high-dollar supporters. I'm not exactly sure how I'll handle this, but i think I will offer sponsored questions and sponsored events. For example, i may organize a debate for this fall & show a banner with sponsors on it at the debate.

I am concerned that sponsorship could affect the mission of this business & sway me to ask partisan questions or allow baseless claims. I'm thinking about how to systematically prevent this from being an issue, but I don't have a solution in mind yet.

Just to pay myself, I need about $2,400 per month from subscribers (about 240 subscribers). Patreon takes 8% + a 2.9%+30c per transaction processing fee. Then I suspect taxes to be around 20%. All in all, this leaves me with about $1,500 take-home pay to afford housing, food, health insurance, and everything else. And depending on business expenses, I may need to bring in more than this. Mind you, this is basically the bare minimum & I would like a higher salary, around $40,000 per year.

Features

As far as new features go, I have some ideas, and this will be partially guided by the community, predominantly by subscribers. I may detail these ideas in a future article, but will not be listing them here.