Idaho Citizens for
Good Government
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Idaho Citizens for
Good Government
Dear Ron Nate, President of the Idaho Freedom Foundation,
Thank you for sending me your “I want to help build a culture of liberty!” letter soliciting donations to your organization and explaining to me the many ways the IFF has helped Idaho overcome the encroachments on our freedoms by the left.
Your foundation’s services have proved most helpful to me in the past few years to help the ICGG (Idaho Citizens for Good Government – https://IdahoCGG.org ) work for the same goals as you. We have published your index scores of state legislators in various forms and have distributed them throughout the state via election campaigns and advertisements.
The ICGG recently helped to kick Chuck Winder out of his powerful senate position by canvassing his district with flyers that used your indexes as part of the information that got the voters to realize the traitorous voting record and influence this RINO has had on the legislature and our laws.
I wanted to thank you so much for this vital service you provide!
I have attempted on several occasions to contact your office via contact forms on your website and phone calls to speak with you on some important ideas for you to consider.
I did get to meet your predecessor, Wayne Hoffman, personally at a meeting in Grangeville earlier this year and briefly spoke with him about some of my ideas but again, I have not been able to achieve any relational communication with him or your foundation so far.
I did get to briefly speak with your office manager one Friday afternoon and she promised to pass on my ideas to Wayne, but again, I have never received a response from your foundation.
So I am taking this opportunity to write to you in hard-copy form to explain some things that I think your foundation would find useful and important. You will find a copy of this letter published on our website as well, with links, at https://idahocgg.org/an-open-letter-to-the-iff/.
First, let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am a retired developer from Microsoft and helped develop several of their operating systems such as Windows NT, OS/2 and products such as MSN Messenger over my 20 year career there. Before that I graduated from UC Berkeley with a Systems EECS Engineering degree and before that I was a Nuclear Power Plant operator aboard the USS Hawkbill submarine so I am a bit of a geek by nature.
I currently am the webmaster for the ICGG’s website and have used that vehicle to help the ICGG educate voters about various issues facing us as a republic.
While acting in this roll I developed several tools to help us generate flyers for each state legislature district based on data obtained from the https://Idaho.gov website and your website at https://idahofreedom.org. One of the reasons I tried to contact your foundation several times was trying to both share my technology with you and to get access to your raw data to help me simplify my work. I have done the same with the state legislature and neither party has allowed me that access so far.
I believe the IFF is actually in a dangerous place. Although you are simply publishing your views on various state laws and bills which is certainly within your rights of freedom of speech, it is also quite possible in our litigious world for you to become considered a party to election interference and suffer expensive lawsuits.
I have also seen people talk badly about the IFF simply because one particular stance on a particular law or issue is not seen as correct.
I also fear any central service to voters as a possible vector for corruption or infiltration to fool the voters to promote an agenda. We have seen this happen with the Republican Party via the RINO problem we have today.
A way to prevent such problems is by letting your users create custom law-preference profiles as I have done. The tool that I created to do this I call the “Law Vote Tool” which you can find at this address: (https://tinyurl.com/LawVoteTool).
What we do is simply to allow the user to specify what laws they care about and which way they would have voted. We also publish your voting preferences as a profile which they can use, modify and compare to.
We then grade all the legislators against the user’s profile so they can see who would vote the way they would just as they could do with your profile or anyone else’s.
This same process can be used to allow candidates to express their views accurately and unambiguously by creating their own profiles and letting voters compare them to candidate’s profiles.
If the IFF offered this option to its users, there is no way it could be accused of election tampering as their opinions are simply one among any number of opinions which anyone could easily create.
My Law Vote Tool was created using the 2023 session data and I have not had time to update it or maintain it for future sessions. Pulling data from ever changing WebPages is both tedious and never ending.
I offer myself to you for consultation and assistance should you decide to embark on this idea.
I further have thought about how the sunshine election contributions database might be used to extend your grading system of various legislators onto donors to their campaigns which would help voters to know which donors to support or oppose and will add yet another layer of transparency to elections and our government.
I have also thought about possibly developing AI based systems to summarize and analyze law text to both assist your analysts in accessing various laws and to use these to highlight and summarize laws for voter review.
These tools and ideas could be extended to each state as well as the federal government and to every county as well.
My thinking is that if we use computers to enforce transparency and political literacy, we can create a less-corrupt and more responsive government and in that way promote the freedoms we all love.
Please feel free to contact me via our contact form at https://idahocgg.org/contact-us/ any time on this or any other issue. I am at your service.
Thank you most sincerely,
Sanford Staab, editor and webmaster
