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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?
I would not use computers! Paper ballot feed in to (Yes computer based) non connected totaling systems. Just my 2 cents ;)
Use an algorithm to create congressional districts with census data so each district has approx. the same amount of possible voters and the smallest circumference. No more rigging to create safe districts for either party with ridiculous borders.
There are is a very active field of "voting theory" research about how voting systems can be improved, but little of it has to do with computers per se, though they can make implementation of the post-vote processing more convenient. That is to say, it is not the "computer" that is improving anything. Various forms of preferential voting have a lot to recommend them, along with variations like "instant run-off".
In general it is a good idea to identify actual problems (e.g. widely unpopular candidates winning due multiple candidates splitting the vote; spoilers being run to siphon of votes from specific candidates, etc.) and propose actual fixes that are subjected to formal analyses, large scale simulations and such to validate that they are improvements.
The suggestions of the OP mostly sound like "let's just try something different" rather than carefully considered improvement proposals.
Second class citizen of the New Gilded Age
Has anyone asked Bennett Haselton? I'll wager he has an idea or three...