I saw the thread about the news site introducing a quiz before allowing comments on news stories, it reminded me of a thought I had recently.
The idea is pretty simple - at the voting booth, or perhaps during an online voting registration process (to avoid huge queues at polling centers), what if there was a questionnaire to take about where you stood on various issues, from immigration to tax to social issues, and then at the end of the quiz it would show you the parties available to vote for and how closely you align with them. There are websites that do this already, I've taken the quizzes and been a little surprised by some of the results at times, whether it being a party having a position I didn't expect, or finding I'm actually slightly more compatible with a party I wasn't intending on voting for.
This is different than another idea that gets talked about sometimes - a political knowledge quiz, where you need to prove a level of understanding of the issues before being allowed to vote. The problem with this is somewhat obvious - it's elitist, and would disproportionately preclude poor people from voting due to the increased likelihood they will be under-educated, therefore essentially creating a democratic filter where the poorer you are, the less your opinion matters. This is already the case in the world, difficult to justify making it worse.
What I'm suggesting doesn't really have that issue, because it wouldn't be 'do you know what % of GDP was spent on the military last year', or knowledge questions like that, but things that anybody who cared enough to vote would be able to answer - 'do you think that healthcare should be provided free of charge', 'should the railway system be publically owned', and these kinds of things. Obviously, you would still have the option to choose no opinion if you didn't care about a particular question.
The reason I thought it was a good idea is because so often you see polls where voters disproportionately agree with left-wing individual policies but vote for right-wing parties - I'm biased to the left, so these are the polls I tend to remember, but it might be true for the right as well. So, that leads me to think that there are a lot of people out there who don't actually know what they are voting for. They might still not understand the issues fully, but that's not a simple problem to solve. It seems like this idea would at least result in elections and referenda that reflect the opinions of the electorate, rather than superficial biases not based on actual policy.
I'm curious to see what people think of it as an idea, or the feasibility of it.
The idea is pretty simple - at the voting booth, or perhaps during an online voting registration process (to avoid huge queues at polling centers), what if there was a questionnaire to take about where you stood on various issues, from immigration to tax to social issues, and then at the end of the quiz it would show you the parties available to vote for and how closely you align with them. There are websites that do this already, I've taken the quizzes and been a little surprised by some of the results at times, whether it being a party having a position I didn't expect, or finding I'm actually slightly more compatible with a party I wasn't intending on voting for.
This is different than another idea that gets talked about sometimes - a political knowledge quiz, where you need to prove a level of understanding of the issues before being allowed to vote. The problem with this is somewhat obvious - it's elitist, and would disproportionately preclude poor people from voting due to the increased likelihood they will be under-educated, therefore essentially creating a democratic filter where the poorer you are, the less your opinion matters. This is already the case in the world, difficult to justify making it worse.
What I'm suggesting doesn't really have that issue, because it wouldn't be 'do you know what % of GDP was spent on the military last year', or knowledge questions like that, but things that anybody who cared enough to vote would be able to answer - 'do you think that healthcare should be provided free of charge', 'should the railway system be publically owned', and these kinds of things. Obviously, you would still have the option to choose no opinion if you didn't care about a particular question.
The reason I thought it was a good idea is because so often you see polls where voters disproportionately agree with left-wing individual policies but vote for right-wing parties - I'm biased to the left, so these are the polls I tend to remember, but it might be true for the right as well. So, that leads me to think that there are a lot of people out there who don't actually know what they are voting for. They might still not understand the issues fully, but that's not a simple problem to solve. It seems like this idea would at least result in elections and referenda that reflect the opinions of the electorate, rather than superficial biases not based on actual policy.
I'm curious to see what people think of it as an idea, or the feasibility of it.
