Make voting great again

Make voting great again

Karel Moeskops

Why choose for the continuous routine with the same politicians who screwed up your life, if you can tell them to go fuck themselves?Not many people know or even care about the consequences but are filled with the desire to give the establishment a piece of their minds. It is only after they released their vengeance via the ballots; the British realized their mistake. Some people even confessed that they just wanted to state their anger by voting for the Brexit.

What is actually going on?

The anger is not only present in England but all over the world. America voted against the establishment and for Trump, the pussy grabbing, war building, climate change denying, healthcare abolishing, tax dodging and foul-mouthed demagogue. In Europe we see this happening as well. A perfect example is the latest referendum in Italy. The referendum was about creating a smaller, cheaper and more uncluttered government. The polls stated that more than 70 percent agreed with it. Renzi felt so confident about the referendum that he even linked his presidency to the outcome of it. Guess what happened? That’s right, the referendum failed and Renzi was forced to quit. All over the world people are not answering the question stated on the ballot anymore, but are stating their discontent with the current politicians by voting “FUCK YOU”.

Why the anger?

In general most people are quite negative about their politicians. The citizens think that the politicians don’t listen to them, partly because a person is never in complete agreement with all the statements of the party. It is like a phone subscription where you can choose between some packages, but it’s never exactly what you want. What you fill in on the ballot never completely represents your opinion, sometimes even far from it.

Another reason is that politicians are considered untrustworthy. They often make promises during the elections which they can’t keep, sometimes for good reason, due to new information or circumstances. But the report about that never really reaches the citizens. People only hear the news of a politician breaking yet again another promise.

Voting gone wrong

It can be difficult to extract any relevant information from everything that is being said. There was so much different coverage about Donald Trump and the Brexit that it confused people about the actual consequences of their choices. Just before the Brexit referendum, busses drove all over Great Britain with the text “We send the EU 350 million pounds a week, let’s fund our Health-Care instead, vote leave”. This 350 million pounds a week wasn’t even remotely true. Still many people were enticed by this argument to vote for the Brexit.The world champion in confusion is of course the great Donald Trump. It is almost impossible to state something which he did not contradict at some point. He created so much chaos that it was impossible to say if a statement was true or false.

The discontent of the people might also lead to a recalcitrant vote. When a person is offered to choose either A or B, he might not choose the option which he thinks is the best one. He will choose the bad option instead to let the government know that he thinks “FUCK YOU”. A form of anger expression. When many people think like this, dangerous decisions can be made. Besides, maybe a little adaption to the current course would already satisfy most voters. However, you can only vote for or against. What do you do then? You vote against. It is like asking your boss “Do you like my work or are you going to fire me?”, while it probably works better to just have a conversation about what you can improve. The voters should be able to give this feedback too, however they can only vote A or B, for or against.

Problem is that the voters rarely even seen the programs of the candidates. Have you ever made an exam for which you didn’t study at all? You probably failed. In education, oneneeds to study in order to pass the exam. Strangely we do not need to know anything about politics to be able to vote. If you were the captain of a ship, navigating along a floe, would you ask advice from 10 people without any knowledge about navigating ships or to the one with experience doing this?

Prevention

In conclusion there are three problems: The citizens are sometimes badly or even falsely informed, they can’t speak their mind and they can’t trust the government. These are serious problems all around the world because everyone uses the same lacking voting system.

To prevent that the voters are badly informed we can easily use a simple multiple choice test, to check if they know what they are voting for. The questions can be randomly selected from a database with dozens of questions and will test if they know enough of the plans of the parties. If they have two out of three questions correct their vote will count. This will make politicians present their perspectives more clearly and citizens who vote to show more interest to those perspectives.

However there is a downside to this, because it could mean that a large amount of the votes won’t count and that those people aren’t represented.The second option will be to make people fill in a vote advisor, which will give you feedback if this agrees with your choice. In the end it will present you your choice according to your answers and if you disagree you can still vote for the party you chose in the beginning. This way voters will be able to speak their mind fully. Besides, the government could in fact use this data to see what people find important topics. We need to reconsider the voting system, so people are aware of their choice. Lately politics has become some kind of theatrical play, rather than governing a country. To remove the theatrics from the choice we need to demand clarity from the politicians and present this to the voters on their ballot.

Published in Simon Ster 48.2