Dave’s Grand Ideas: Amazon for Voters

What’s the biggest problem with our system of democracy? John McCain and Russell Feingold seem to think that it’s lax campaign finance rules that allow moneyed interests to funnel cash into campaigns. Others think it’s media bias or homogeneity of opinion between the two parties.

I happen to think the main problem is too much information.

The general public is often only aware of the hottest of hot-button issues — gay marriage, flag burning, the war in Iraq. And while sometimes our own personal stance on a particular issue is strong enough to tilt us in favor of one candidate or the other, it’s often a more nebulous decision-making process than that. There are a million issues that deserve our attention and a legislative trail a thousand miles long. So, overwhelmed by all this data, we end up voting for our national representatives strictly on the party line. Or, even worse, we vote on the basis of our feelings about a particular candidate — and as we all know, our feelings are easily manipulated by the mass medium of television.

And that’s just on a national level. What about all of those tens of thousands of candidates for local and regional office? Most of us know that we can tune in to the local newspaper on the last few days before the election and get a nice, concise summary of the candidates’ views. But we don’t necessarily trust these concise summaries. And so we end up staying home from local elections simply because we don’t know anything about these races.

One might think that you could conduct adequate research about political candidates via the Internet. But have you ever tried to wade through a politician’s website? They’re invariably stuffed to the gills with self-promotional blather and doublespeak. Like the television commercials, they’re generally designed not to disseminate information, but to give the prospective voter a warm and fuzzy feeling about the candidate.

So here’s a Grand Idea: what if someone built an independent voter information aggregator? Let’s call it Amazon for Voters. (You’ll see why I invoke the name of Amazon shortly.)

Here’s how it would work.

You, the voter, access the Amazon for Voters website and fill out a short questionnaire. Which issues are the most important to you? Choose from a set of drop-down menus a list of the top ten issues that you care about. Let’s say you choose gun control, abortion, and welfare reform. Amazon for Voters asks you where you stand on each particular issue. Pro-gun or pro-gun control? Pro-life or pro-choice? More money for welfare programs, or slash the heck out of those welfare budgets?

Click “Submit,” and the system instantly tabulates a list of the candidates for whom you’re eligible to vote that match your viewpoint. You get a numerical score: “Rep. John Doe is an 83% match on your views.”

How is this score calculated? Through legislative scorecards from independent organizations like the League of Women Voters, the National Rifle Association, NARAL, etc. Through a statistical analysis of that person’s actual voting history. Through endorsements by this or that organization.

Or better yet, through the candidates’ own self-rankings. Candidates (or rather, their staffs) fill out voter questionnaires like this all the time, but I’ve never heard of anyone compiling all of them into a comprehensive statistical database. (Or if someone has, they haven’t bothered to put it in a nice, user-friendly package for the masses and publicize it.)

There are certainly a number of issues in which most candidates are going to rank themselves squarely in the mushy middle — “I feel like government can’t afford to pay for our senior citizens’ prescription drugs, but I also feel like we can’t leave our elderly population out in the cold” — but there are also a number of issues where candidates are happy to make their positions widely known. How many politicians try to hide their position on abortion, for instance?

The best part about Amazon for Voters is that it’s completely nonpartisan. The system doesn’t place any judgment on the politicians’ views, or your views for that matter; it simply provides a numerical index for how closely your views match with each candidate’s views. It will work equally well for anyone from the hard left to the hard right.

Now here’s where things start getting fun.

Let’s say you’re passionate about a particular issue: the flag burning amendment, for instance. You’re willing to devote some time and money to the cause of passing/defeating this wonderful/horrible amendment, but you don’t know where to start. Log on to Amazon for Voters, click on the flag burning amendment link, and you can find where your local politicians stand on the issue. Furthermore, since the site cross-references both the candidates’ fundraising numbers and the latest polls, you can see which candidates most need your time and/or money. You can tell, for instance, that Candidate A (who supports your view) is in a tight race with Candidate B (who opposes your view) and has a much smaller campaign warchest.

Or suppose you’re already planning to vote for Hillary Clinton in the national Democratic primary for president and Barbara Mikulski for senator, but you’re conflicted on the Maryland governor’s race. (An unlikely scenario, but work with me here, people.) Amazon for Voters will inform you that Democratic candidate Martin O’Malley has a 74% agreement with Clinton’s and Mikulski’s views, while Republican candidate Robert Ehrlich only has a 41% agreement.

Basically the point is this: let’s take the amorphous, meaningless blather about “trust” and “character” out of the political dialogue and replace it with cold, hard, computer-tabulated facts. The end result? A more informed electorate, and one that is less susceptible to media manipulation. Such is my theory, anyway.

By this point, you’re probably thinking that this system is ripe for exploitation and abuse. Of course it is. There are a lot of potential pitfalls here, and lots of campaign laws and regulations to steer around (of which I’m largely ignorant). But you can minimize these troubles with a few simple guiding principles:

  • Transparency. The whole works should be done via open-source software. Any editorial input should be clearly labeled as such. Calculations should be clearly documented.
  • Neutrality. If you can’t find a nonpartisan source of information for something, then at least make sure the right and left are equally represented.
  • Independence. Accept no funding from any partisan group (or, again, insist on equal funding from groups from all sides of the political spectrum).
  • Anonymity. For the users, at least. Your IP address is not logged, your e-mail address is not collected, your credit card and social security number are nowhere to be found.

You might also wonder: even if this works, is this system necessarily a good thing? What if the system did become successful? Do we want voters deciding the outcome of an election based on some computer-generated recommendation?

I say yes.

Why? Because Amazon for Voters wouldn’t just spit out politicians’ names out of context and expect you to take them as gospel. You’d get a detailed explanation to justify the system’s recommendation, complete with links to the requisite source material. You’d get handy links to both your candidate’s website and his opponent’s, along with links to endorsements, scorecards, independent opinions, partisan opinions and more. You’d get to read comments from registered users who have voted for this or that candidate, and maybe statements from the candidates themselves.

Will there be people who would just log in the day of an election and pull up a list of candidate recommendations without doing any of the background research? Sure. But how much worse is that than the voter who trucks down to the polling place and just apes the party’s sample ballot without even being aware what they’re voting for?

Let’s think of the Amazon comparison. Before Amazon came along, how much research did we put into the books that you bought? Perhaps we read a single critic’s opinion in the New York Times Book Review. Perhaps we saw a single ad or were persuaded by the author blurb on the cover. But now? Now we can read dozens of independent reviews. We can see real readers giving their opinions in real time, and we can see actual statistics that show definitively that, yes, people who buy Neal Stephenson’s books tend to buy William Gibson’s too.

I know that I, for one, am certainly a smarter consumer than I used to be because of Amazon. I would jump at the chance to be a smarter and more diligent citizen, too.

Probably the biggest potential problem with a system like this would be the funding. You need someone to host the database and someone to design the comparison algorithms. You need political consultants who can give weight to all the varied sources of information out there. Most importantly, you need people to input all these hundreds of thousands of informational nuggets into the system, and you need them to do it on a timely fashion. All this costs money — and remember, as per above, this won’t work if it’s funded by the DNC or the RNC.

But let’s suppose that some nonprofit decided to fund a project like this. Let’s suppose it’s given a couple of years to incubate and mature.

This could work. Why not?