How to change the voting system?
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Every time I have to cast my vote for the elections, I’m stunned by the amateurism and I’m always wondering… why am I voting in the first place? It is a hassle and the incentive to cast your vote is low! I have to go somewhere while I’d like to work and stay on the office (Why can’t I vote from my office?) and my vote ends up in that huge pile of votes, so what influence do I have….
About two weeks ago Arjen and I had a discussion about elections and how people are stimulated to vote. The conclusion was (at least here in the Netherlands) that there is almost no incentive to vote, your vote ends up in the huge pile of votes and is statistically meaningless. It’s even worse! Your vote has just as much voting power as any grandma’s vote, while you have been studying politics, dug into the political problems, did background research on all party members and spend 3 hours on a daily basis reading papers surfing the web to make a 100% sure that you suck in all the information which you think is needed to cast your (valuable) vote. The 90 year old grandma (not anyone in particular) gets up on voting day, goes to the voting booth and presses a button (she forgot her glasses so she was not 100% sure which button it was). Both votes have the same power. Conventional wisdom says that one person has one vote, every person is equal, that is the basics of Democracy, right?
But wouldn’t it make sense that the vote of the guy who knows everything about politics has more power than grandma’s vote?
But wouldn’t it make sense that the vote of the guy who knows everything about politics has more power than grandma’s vote?
We all know that in real life this probably will not happen in the next 100 years (or maybe even never), so how do we know if and how this would work? The best thing we can do is to mimic an election and use the web (what else!) to test this.
It happens that we started The Next Web Awards, the worldwide award for future accomplishments. So why not experiment with these Awards to see if we can give people more incentive to vote?
The question we asked ourselves was: How do we give people an incentive to vote and to collect a lot of votes (that is basically the same question our government is asking every time when an election is coming up).
Here is what we thought:
1. it has to be easy to vote. No threshold (solution, we use the web)
2. Instant reward
3. NOT all votes have equal voting power
4. Reward the “top” voters
So what we did is give the voter the possibility to get rewarded instantly. If you vote in all 8 categories we will double your voting power (we reward you for the time invested). But then there are other ways to empower your vote, but this time the voter is depending on others (your network or blog readers). You can invite your friends, colleagues or business contacts to cast a vote as well. If they do that, then your vote gets more power. Same story with your blog readers, if you put the widget on your site, all votes collected via that widget empower your votes.
the top 100 voters (the people who have referred the most votes) end up on the front page with a link to their site/blog.
We build in a maximum voting power. Any vote can count up to 12 times in the election.
1 vote = 1 vote
Vote in all categories and we will count your votes 2 times
Invite friends and multiply your power again 2 times
Install the widget and your voting power will be multiplied with a factor 3.
1 x 2 x 2 x 3 = 12
If you’d translate this into the real world, you might be on to something…. at least it would make sense to give some voters more power than others (if they have more knowledge, can stimulate others to cast their vote, etc.).
I think it is a fun experiment. Via http://twitter.com/NextWeb we will keep you up to date on the progress.
Wrote on April 19, 2007 @ 6:56 am
Interesting point of view about voting. I’m not sure whether it would be a good idea to implement this for the real world elections.
But it sure is an interesting experiment for the kind of elections like the Next Web Awards and I’m curious about the figures after the voting (how many people tried to get extra voting ‘power’).
Wrote on April 19, 2007 @ 2:35 pm
Why will this work? And why are votes from people who know how to reach many other people more valuable? They already have great power, so why give them more power?
You said it yourself; the more you know about the thing you gonna vote for, the more value does your vote have. So why not test the voters before they vote? Aks them some simple questions, and if they answer it correctly they can vote. This way only people who know the business well can vote.
I’d like to see this kind of stuff in the Dutch elections. Your vote only counts if you give the right answers to questions about the program of the party you just voted for.
patrick said,
Wrote on April 19, 2007 @ 3:14 pm
@Reinier I think your making a point here and I do agree with you that it would be a good thing to ask some simple and basic question about politics before you cast your votes.
One problem with election is…that a lot of people do not vote at all! So, probably a mix between knowledge and letting more people vote would be the best of both worlds.
Are you contacting the Dutch government about this…. :)
Wouter said,
Wrote on April 20, 2007 @ 6:21 pm
Some politician (I forgot who :)) once said that democracy isn’t the best form of government, but it is better than any other form they tried.
Your idea sounds interesting, but i do have some remarks.
I think it rather impossible (to decide how) to measure if a vote should be counted or not. Is it ok to vote labor if you think they got good politicians? Is it ok to vote some right wing party, because you think they are the only ones to address the (perceived) immigrant problem? Do you think it’s ok to vote some left wing party because no one else seems to care about bio-industry?
Secondly, I think the interests of the ’smart/interested people’ (the ones that will pass a voting test like you propose) are different from the interests of the ‘dumb/don’t care people’ (people that will fail a voting test). Eventually, the smart will rule the weak, and that’s not what democracy is about. You might believe the smart people’s intentions are good, but you cannot base a form on government on these kinds of beliefs.
Thirdly, you could wonder if ‘better’ voting will result in a better government, or increased quality of life or whatever. No matter how stupid a vote might be, the politician that got the vote should be capable to do his/her job just fine.
patrick said,
Wrote on April 22, 2007 @ 7:16 pm
Hey Wouter,
My idea is definitely not to give smart and interested people more voting power. One of the things I like to tink about is how to give people more incentive to vote. In the Netherlands about 30% of the people (who are allowed to vote) do not vote at all.
So first of all it should be easier to cast your vote (via the Internet). Another idea is to get people more involved into politics. Empowering votes might just do that.
But the way you should implement that is a difficult discussion and goes beyond my scope. I just think it is an interesting discussion though.