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Ask Slashdot: How Would You Use Computers To Make Elections Better?
shanen writes: Regarding politics, is there anything that Americans agree on? If so, it's probably something negative like "The system is broken," or "The leading candidates are terrible," or even "Your state is a shithole." With all our fancy technology, what's going wrong? Our computers are creating problems, not solutions. For example, gerrymandering relies on fancy computers to rig the maps. Negative campaigning increasingly relies on computers to target the attacks on specific voters. Even international attacks exploit the internet to intrude into elections around the world. Here are three of my suggested solutions, though I can't imagine any of today's politicians would ever support anything along these lines:
(1) Guest voting: If you hate your district, you could vote in a neighboring district. The more they gerrymander, the less predictable the election results.
(2) Results-based weighting: The winning candidates get more voting power in the legislature, reflecting how many people actually voted for them. If you win a boring and uncontested election where few people vote, then part of your vote in the legislature would be transferred to the winners who also had more real votes.
(3) Negative voting: A voter could use an electronic ballot to make it explicit that the vote is negative, not positive. The candidate with the most positive or fewest negative votes still wins, but if the election has too many negative votes, then that "winner" would be penalized, perhaps with a half term rather than a full term.
What wild and crazy ideas do you have for using computers to make elections better, not worse?
(1) Guest voting: If you hate your district, you could vote in a neighboring district. The more they gerrymander, the less predictable the election results.
(2) Results-based weighting: The winning candidates get more voting power in the legislature, reflecting how many people actually voted for them. If you win a boring and uncontested election where few people vote, then part of your vote in the legislature would be transferred to the winners who also had more real votes.
(3) Negative voting: A voter could use an electronic ballot to make it explicit that the vote is negative, not positive. The candidate with the most positive or fewest negative votes still wins, but if the election has too many negative votes, then that "winner" would be penalized, perhaps with a half term rather than a full term.
What wild and crazy ideas do you have for using computers to make elections better, not worse?
Do it like they do in Australia.
Changing the electoral boundaries is done by an independent body (the Australian Electoral Commission).
It is done on a regular basis and is designed to ensure that each state has a suitable number of representatives based on its population and that each electoral district has a similar number of electors.
Generally the AEC will try and keep related areas in the same district (e.g. a specific suburb will all be in one district for the most part) and they also take submissions from people into account when drawing up the boundaries.
Since its done independently and people get to have a proper say, no-one can argue its unfair to them (e.g. they cant say "hey we dont think its fair that our poor black neighborhood is in a district of mostly rich white people" because they had the opportunity to complain/object to that decision and because no-one can argue that the decision was in any way political.
Not that it matters to you, but no one can find any evidence of these hordes of fraudulent voters swaying any recent elections. You've gotta go back decades before you find even half-way plausible stories to that effect.