Posted by nadams on 10/24/09 11:04 PM Last updated 10/24/09 3:33 PM [Newer: The Battle for FED Transparency Continues in Georgia] [Older: Book Review: The Creature from Jekyll Island]

In case you haven't noticed, the Campaign for Liberty has made Step 4 of the Local Coordinator Training available. But before you can even begin Step 4, you must first complete Step 3: Get to Know Your Elected Officials. To help you along, I have created this short guide explaining How I Completed Step 3:

1. Like most Americans, I graduated high school (and college) woefully ignorant of the basic structure of my state and local government. How many of you can even recall which state legislative district you live in, much less who your representatives are? Luckily, my Secretary of State's website has a 'poll locator' tool which lists all of the political boundaries that I live in. This information is obviously key to completing this section of the training.
2. The basic point of this section of training is for local coordinators to educate themselves on local political figures at the city, county, district, and state levels. Obviously Internet search engines are your friend. I found it beneficial to first locate the websites for my city (Atlanta), county (Fulton), and state (Georgia General Assembly/Governor) and to then dig through each website for information. Also, the Campaign for Liberty provides a great resource for identifying your US Congressional delegation.
3. The training will ask you to research details about each official's political career and most recent race results. In Georgia, the SoS website is your best resource. To find individual race results:
   1. Visit the Election Results page and select the year of interest (start with the latest results and work your way down if you are unsure).
   2. For local city/county races: Download/view the Vote Totals by Precinct information. In Georgia, this may be the only way to research results for some local races ("news" organizations typically don't report the final tally).
   3. For state-wide races. You will need to re-visit the Election Results page for state-wide results.
   4. Search for the elected official by last name. I was surprised by how many of my elected officials ran unopposed!

I hope you found this meager guide helpful. I truly believe that the Campaign for Liberty has provided us with the training and guidance that we need to achieve and defend freedom in our lifetimes. Now we just have to get to work doing it.

Posted 10/26/09 07:50 AM Nancy Zee Poughkeepsie, NY

In my area it was very difficult to find out who these people were. I found doing foil requests of the petitions that are done to get on the ballot very eye-opening. Until I started to run for office as a total non-partisan independent the process was very unclear to me. Another eye-opening area was reporting my financials to NYS BoE. From that excercise I learned I could find all the local contributors to my local Republican, Democrat, Conservative, etc parties. As with most things people put their money on what is important to them. Made it easier to find out who were the strong local party people. Asking was a waste of time for me. I hope to get back into completing my local coordinator program, but have actually gotten on the Nov 3rd 2009 ballot......so campaigning the best I can. I think more of us must try to get in government at the very lowest of levels. Try to re-emphasize that although national and state positions are very important many of us only have the "abilities" or experience to start at the bottom first. YAL is targeting 2010.....but no one seemed interested in 2009. Every year, every election must be faught.