My change.gov question for Barack Obama (in-state tuition for illegal aliens)

Change dot gov is soliciting questions from the citizens and allowing others to vote on submitted questions. Presumably Obama will answer the most popular questions and, as previously discussed this system shares the same flaws as other popular voting systems and is thus little more than a scam designed to fool people into thinking that Obama will answer tough questions.

As a test, I (using the same Robert Bellaire pseudonym as I used at MyBHO) submitted the following question. Due to character length limitations I didn't include as much supporting information as I would have wanted:

You support giving in-state tuition to illegal aliens. But, each such discount given to an illegal alien represents one that's taken away from a U.S. citizen. What would you say to a U.S. citizen who can't go to college because of what you support?

I wasn't able to determine a permalink for the question, but you can find it by searching for tuition illegal at change.gov/page/content/openforquestions.

I predict it will get very few up votes and a larger number of down votes, and it might be marked as "inappropriate" and removed entirely as they've done with other questions. However, if I got, say, an Instapundit-level of traffic I could probably propel it near the top. And, that illustrates the peril of such systems and why they're a scam: the questions that Obama should be asked will never make it out of the starting gate.

12/29/08 UPDATE: I did slightly better than expected, getting 17 up and 13 down. More on that and the other questions here.

I also resubmitted the same question for Round 2 of their contest. They've added categories for education, defense, etc. meaning there will be slightly less noise. However, as before, my tough question will be ignored in favor of lightweight questions that Obama won't have trouble with.

Immigration2008a · Thu, 12/11/2008 - 13:33 · · Importance: 9