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Saturday, December 14, 2019

Politics

I try to ignore politics, but it is so pervasive some of it gets through to me anyway. I know, for instance that Donald Trump is the President of the USA, and Boris Johnson just won a landslide victory in the UK. If you mention my representative or my senators, I will probably recognize their names.

My vote my be important, and I would vote if someone would tell me who to vote for. If I agreed with the Democrats or the Republicans it would be easy, I could just vote the straight party ticket. But both parties have big defects, so I'm not going to do that.

Then I got a big idea: a web site that helps you figure out who to vote for.  Have a list of issues. All you have to do is decide how much you care about the issue (and which direction you lean), and the website would sort through the various candidates and pick the ones that best suit your viewpoint.

It might be a little difficult to sort out some of these people, what with the weasel words, flip-flopping and the way some issues get combined with others so if you support one, you're shooting yourself in the foot on the other.

Then you might want to grade each candidate on character, things like crimes, scams and scandals would need to be evaluated. You can bet politics will try to color this score.

Of course, this would only be useful for people who like getting their data in black and white. Not everybody is a reader. I suspect a goodly majority of people prefer getting their information the old fashioned way: by word of mouth, straight from the television.

And how would you ensure the whole thing was accurate? Sounds like a lot of work, but think of the advertising revenue. It could be the next Facebook.

2 comments:

  1. We have a website like this in Germany for our elections, Chuck.
    Almost. It only rates the issues factually; it doesn't grade each candidate on character, things like crimes, scams and scandals though.

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  2. If they accept advertising revenue can they be trusted?
    If they don't, what's their angle, who's paying for this, who's behind the curtain?

    I'm afraid we've gotten to the point where confirmational bias rules everything.
    Say what I want to hear or it's fake news. I doubt the politicians would want it to succeed, the more confusing the ballot the more voters stay home so the core can carry the day.

    I think your idea it wonderful but don't see it working.

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