This year’s recipient of the King County Bar Association's President’s Award is a member of two KCBAs — the King County and Kitsap County bar associations. This is not some mixed up, cross-Sound mistake, but a well-deserved recognition of Paul Fjelstad’s outstanding design and implementation of the voter education project votingforjudges.org.
Paul’s interest in computers dates back to the early 1970s, when he earned spending money with a part-time job programming a mainframe computer. Following law school at the University of Minnesota, Paul moved to New York City, where he began his legal career practicing securities law. Turning to a more academic practice, he worked for Matthew Bender, revising and writing new chapters for Moore’s Federal Practice. These were the early days of the Internet and Paul actively participated in the first law-related Internet user groups, eventually leading him into designing and creating the first CD version of Moore’s Federal Practice.
After living 15 years in New York City, perhaps it was his Minnesota roots that led Paul to leave the city and seek a greener and more mellow lifestyle. Having visited Washington, Paul settled in beautiful Kitsap County and hung out his shingle. With his background, it was only natural that Paul would gravitate to legal research and writing, with a strong dose of high-tech savvy. Paul has designed and developed Web sites for a number of lawyers and non-lawyers, as well as the Kitsap County Bar Association, Kitsap Legal Services and other organizations.
Last summer, the Judicial Selection Coalition approached Paul with the germ of an idea — would Paul act as webmaster for a new Internet site to provide voters with information about Supreme Court and Court of Appeals candidates? Paul immediately grasped the potential of such a site, brainstormed inventing the name, secured the domain and nurtured this modest seed into an amazingly informative source of information. Working on a shoestring budget, Paul singlehandedly created votingforjudges.org.
He developed an interactive map of Washington so that voters could select their county to learn what judicial candidates would be on their ballot. He gathered the data on each candidate, including information from the voter pamphlet, candidate Web sites, endorsements, evaluations and newspaper articles. Perhaps his most valuable contribution was to mine the Public Disclosure Commission Web site and convert the PDC mass of contribution and expenditure data into easily understood charts and tables.
Votingforjudges.org received overwhelming praise from media and Internet users alike. The Seattle Times advised its readers “to bookmark this site and recycle the campaign brochures stuffing their mailboxes and littering their porches.” The Spokane Spokesman-Review called votingforjudges.org “a welcome addition to the information-gathering quest voters face in judicial races.” An enthusiastic visitor responded: “THANK YOU - REPEAT THAT 1000 TIMES. Your links to various newspaper endorsements gave me such a clear picture of which candidate to choose that I am confident I am making the right choices.”
The site has now been recognized nationally as well. The American Bar Association last month selected votingforjudges.org as the winner of its annual Silver Gavel Award in the New Media Category. [Please see page 1 of this issue for more information.]
We can only hope that Paul will agree to continue as webmaster for votingforjudges.org.
Charlie Wiggins is an appellate attorney with Wiggins and Masters on Bainbridge Island.
