My boyfriend has a tradition of holding a ballot discussion party he calls "Pizza & Politics" every time before there's an election.
We don't actually have beer at it because neither of us or our friends are beer people, but someone suggested it made a more catchy title, PLUS other people are certainly welcome to have beer if they like this idea. Details below the fold...
The idea is to get people together to talk about the various things on the ballot and have a friendly and mild debate over some tasty dinner (or lunch). Especially here in CA we tend to have a lot of propositions and initiatives and they usually don't get voted on by a large number of people because they're complicated and people don't understand them. The goal of this event is to change that and help people be informed and to do it in as friendly and fun a way as possible. We tell people to bring laptops which can be hooked up to the house wireless network, their sample ballots, and any other election literature they may have picked up or gotten in the mail.
The event is billed as being non-partisan, though most of our friends are liberals of some stripe. We have gotten democrats, independants, libertarians, greens, and I don't think a single event has gone by in the ~3 years I've been involved with this without at least one republican in attendance (admittedly of the more moderate stripe). Consensus is NOT required to be reached - we discuss and research an issue until everyone feels they have enough information and opinions to make up their own minds on how to vote and then we move on to the next one. In the primary recently we did discuss candidates in addition to propositions because there were so many of them (that discussion did leave our republican friend somewhat left out but she actually had some useful input on a couple of the races even though she couldn't vote in them herself). If there are county-wide initiatives people sometimes break into smaller groups based on what county they live in to discuss those.
We try to hold the event about 2 weeks before the election. This is late enough that most people have gotten all their literature and early enough that people can still submit absentee ballots by mail (I live in CA where a lot of my friends are registered permanent absentee. I am and my boyfriend is). Of course it depends on scheduling - this year we're holding it Oct 29th because that's when the most people were available. We generally get between 10 and 20 people and discussion is lively. No idea what our expected crowd is this time around (I am not the keeper of the RSVPs!)...
Afterwards my boyfriend generally writes up a summary of the discussion (with how he eventually decided he is voting and his reasons why) and posts it in his livejournal so that people who weren't in attendance can at least get some of the info.
We hold our event at my boyfriend's house in Palo Alto but I have other friends who do similar events over in the East Bay and up in San Francisco. And, no, I'm sorry, I can't actually invite all of DailyKos - the livingroom is just not that big! But if you like the idea I highly encourage you hold your own. You could even call it "Elections and Empanadas" if that's more your style. Or "Voting and Vichyssoise" or... you get the idea :)
So how about it? Anyone else going to hold a ballot discussion party?