All us WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic) countries seem to spend a really embarrassing amount of time talking about the pointless minutiae surrounding our candidates for office and their personal lives.
We are also prone to backing very crap candidates based on personality, rhetoric, appearance ie: things that have nothing to do with being a good executive or legislator.
I think we should ban names from the election process and just have each party submit their ideas in writing and let people vote based on those submissions.
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This is the idea behind direct ballot measures. Instead of working through representatives, just let people make actual decisions. Of course, there are problems with it. You wind up looking at a ballot with 10 different bond measures on it as if you’re in any position to decide on the budgets for 6 different agencies. And all the voter guides scream contradictory things at you from the pro/con positions, leaving you thinking “gee, maybe politician is actually a profession after all?”
I actually sort of like this idea. People would still figure it out, of course, but it’d shift people’s default attention from the person to the platform.
each party
Who decides who is a “party”?
Large corporate donors decide, in a non-representative winner-take-all vote system.
Also, I think they meant to say “both parties”.
Proportional representation is pretty close. You still vote a specific politician, but the vote benefits everyone in that party. Basically this means that you really need to read what the party is trying to accomplish and pick the one you like the most. Then you’ll pick your favorite candidate in that party, and cast your vote.
I think that would be great - if people were incapable of lying. As it is, the candidate with the most people-pleasing program (true or not) would win and you wouldn’t be able to check their past activities to see whether they’re trustworthy at all.
Have you heard of liquid democracy?
All us…countries seem to spend a really embarrassing amount of time talking about the pointless minutiae surrounding our candidates for office and their personal lives
We just…don’t though
Even if we did it’d be drowned out by the utter drivel spewing out of the one country that does
Yes. You should be presented with a set of multiple choice questions where the answers are each of the parties stances on the matter and at the end your vote should be divided among the parties based on how you answered the questions.
I tried one of those surveys before the last election, and it concluded that I was most closely aligned with the Green Party. Alas, they don’t have a chance in Hell where I am. They are so far off the radar I wasn’t even aware they were fielding a candidate in my district. But it does make me wonder though. If such surveys actually informed how people vote, would the balance of power shift? I think it would help if our voting system (I’m in Canada) changed to something other than first-past-the-post?
Moving away from FPTP is, for democracy, the crucial first step that very few seem to have taken.
That would require parties to follow through on their platforms to work.
For example, Republicans say they value life but do the opposite by forcing women to die because they can’t access medical care for unviable pregnancies. They say they want border reform but vote against bills that would fund the courts that process immigrants. They say they willl lower taxes for the common person, but lower it for the top 1% and raise them for everyone else.
Platforms are great and all if they meant anything.
See my response above that takes this into consideration.
Someday, we will vote for sentient AI candidates.
