If you’ve spent some time online in the past few days, I’m sure you’ve come across the video I embedded above. In it, celebrities urge people to satirically not vote in the upcoming election (Jonah Hill of Superbad fame, is particularly hilarious).  Once the video was over, I took the advice of Courtney Cox, Leonardo DiCaprio (whose personal studio helped produce the web PSA) and others and clicked over to the site linked in the video—a special Google Map that serves you links for ensuring you’re registered to vote your part of the country. Check it out so you can find online resources for the state in which you reside.

The video played fine and the Google Maps User Voter Info mashup worked great. Not surprisingly though, the technical bottleneck came when I reached the Texas Secretary of State’s website. Not only was it of an ugly design (which I normally groan about with municipal sites then move on), but everything was counter-intuitive, broken or frustratingly unusable. Clicking on links led to downloads of so many PDFs, you’d think the site was sponsored by Adobe Acrobat.

Now, I realize that a site made for the state of Texas (or any state for that matter) is a huge undertaking and would cost tons and tons of taxpayer money. Governments have so much going on, I’m sure their web presence is not of top priority, but to me—someone who practically does everything online—it is. Is it really so much to ask for something organized, easy to use and somewhat nice to look at?

I’m always in awe when a large corporation understands technology and isn’t necessarily directly involved in it. I think I would be even more impressed if my state government “got it.” (Thankfully, the city of Austin gets it with their AustinGO Project—a redesign of the city website along with a new philosophy of a more open government).

If people really do want me to vote, then make it easy for me, in the way that I know how to do it. I’m not looking to SMS in my vote (although that would be awesome), just make information accessible, easy to digest and for the love, no more PDF links!

And now, I’m going to go watch the vice presidential debates. Online.