Slashdot Mirror
Web-Based Assistant Changes the Face of Dutch Politics
An anonymous reader writes "The elections held in The Netherlands on Wednesday have shaken the country. Almost 10 million votes were cast, and statistics show that a full half of those who voted used a popular web-based voter guide. This guide is operated by the independent institute for the public and politics. Advice is given to the visitor upon answering a number of multiple choice questions on some common political topics. Statistically, a number of people ended up scoring in support of populist parties both on the far left and far right. No bias was reported to exist in the test itself. However, these parties have ended up with an unforeseen amount of power as a result of the election. The voter participation was high, and the web-based advisories may have motivated people with little interest in politics to cast a vote anyway. Can politics be simplified to a ten minute test?"
The same happened to me; As a dutch voter I also tried out the 'Stemwijzer', and encountered a very strange advice of what to vote for, namely the 'Partij voor de Dieren' ; or 'Party for Animals', a leftish party who is fighting for more animal rights, but has not too much opinions on stuff that -also- matters.
The strange thing though; Second on the advice was 'EénNL' ; Or One NL , a party who is very much leaning to the right.
Other friends of mine also got very strange advices (ranging from hardcore religious to far-right parties), and while we could see that the tool was clearly unbalanced (either by asking the wrong questions, or by having some weird measurement being used) and its results should be taken with a grain of salt, we were worried for others who would take this advice regardless.
The end-result, where both extreme-left as extreme right had a victory, might have had some of its origin in the advice dealt out by this site.
Then again, relying on twenty one-liners to determine a final vote is not really that good a thing in the first place.
Living as we do in the information age, there's clearly a lot more that can be done with voting than we're doing at the moment.
For example, we could have 'continuous voting'. Everybody who is eligible to vote can log into a website at any time, on any day of the year, and change their standing vote. Every day the totals and trends are made public, and a sufficient shift in opinion changes who is in power. (With some buffering, obviously -- e.g. you need a majority of 60% for six months to cause a switch, but a majority of 80% will cause power to change hands in a month).
Instead of voting on parties, why not vote on issues? Then let the parties declare their positions on each issue, and match the one to the other.
I'm not saying these would work better than current systems, necessarily -- but think of the possibilities! Of course there's vast scope for broken systems that lead to bad things happening... but then, that's nothing new.