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It's mostly off topic now, but I was wondering why (as this article suggests) we are still having problems counting votes. In particular, if the polling place has incomplete or incorrect information about you, you may be stuck with a provisional ballot. After you vote your provisional ballot, you'll never know if your vote was counted; you just have to trust the election authorities. What if we did something like this:

• All ballots have a serial number.
• When you vote, you keep a chit with your ballot's serial number.
• Serial numbers are distributed at random so that your ballot cannot be associated with you solely by knowing the serial number. (Preserves secret ballot.)
• At end of election, elections board publishes a text file that lists each ballot serial number and the votes counted for that serial number. This must be public and can be because serial numbers are anonymous.
• Voters, or organizations acting on their behalf, can verify that their votes have been counted as intended by searching the published list for their serial number.

• A number of organizations that support this behavior could take down your information right outside the polling place (like an exit poll) and verify it later for you automatically. You'd pick an organization that you trust and has some incentive for arguing that your votes were counted.

Wouldn't this solve the provisional ballots problem? Are there any problems with it that I haven't foreseen?

Few of my friends will be happy to see Bush win. But on the other hand, Kerry is a rather pathetic candidate too. Assuming that Bush does win, what's going to happen? It's time to make some predictions.

1.

With the assistance of a bold Republican congress, Bush will get additional steam for the continued occupation of Iraq. This is badly needed, but will not be enough. The election win will only bolster Bush's overconfidence on Iraq, and the administration will hardly even try to strike the deals we need with India, China, and Russia to bring 100,000 non-American troops into Iraq. After two years, Russia will pledge some troops but not enough. Near the end of Bush's second term, China will begin to consider some sort of military partnership with the US to bring the middle east out of total chaos, and it will be up to the next president to develop the partnership.

2.

Increased spending on Iraq will further balloon the budget deficit. I believe improving world security is a worthwhile infrastructure investment, so I'm not freaked out about this. Additionally, the administration will come close to neglect of the domestic economy, which is probably the best possible outcome. Without a reelection to worry about, we're likely to get lied to spoken to less.

Where Bush does damage domestically may be Social Security. The risk here is not exactly privatization itself, which could be done without harm, but that whatever changes they have in mind will create a domestic budget crisis. By characterizing the crisis in terms of "welfare spending," Bush could strike a powerful political triple-play:

1. reunite fiscally conservative Republicans with the Christian right
2. distract nation from ongoing costs of reconstruction in Iraq
3. actually cut welfare spending.

Pulling off this sort of thing would be huge political win for the Republicans. It is likely to make many domestic issues marginally worse, including healthcare (especially for the poor).

3.

A new generation of voters is outraged at the secretive and deceptive manners of our nation's leadership. Looking for a leader, we will probably not find anyone actually good. But the process of looking will set out our values as a political bloc, and these values will guide the mainstream voters in 20 years. The foremost will state that leaders must be communicators. A good politician cleverly leverages the media, including websites/weblogs she directly authors, to communicate with voters and constituents.

4.

John Kerry will not be doing Viagra advertisements, and it will be possible to take a walk around Beacon Hill without being accosted by the Secret Service.

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(… as of the time of this recording.)

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Local video blogger Steve Garfield, who will be "a guy with a videocamera" at the DNC next week, was featured on Fox 25 news. Watch the excellent report.

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A frank and insightful view of possible VPs.

7. Paul Tsongas, former Senator, Massachusetts
Pro: Fiscal conservative, appeal could cross party lines
Con: From same state as Kerry, died in 1997

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http://home.comcast.net/~paul.strother/lagado/DICKCheney.mp3

There's been a lot of talk in the Berkman group about using technology to help voters make more informed decisions. As I was reading this article from The Nation (thanks Jim Moore), I got to thinking: if Dean knew that the mass media were going to turn on him, why didn't he plug his website at every opportunity? Well, it wouldn't have been very useful because it is mostly a rah-rah brochure with lots of padding in between actual position statements.

Let's face it: when a candidate is on TV or in a debate, they give canned, generic responses that I'll call brochure answers. These are designed to make everyone feel good about the candidate, without giving away enough actual policy to turn anyone off. They're fluff.

Now, if a candidate actually did stake out some positions in any detail, we would have a much more honest and straightforward election. It would become feasible to know what policies Mr./Mrs. Whoever actually advocates. Right now the best place to get candidate position information is perhaps from the League of Women Voters' DemocracyNet, but the candidate-supplied statements there are incomplete and vague. They're statements manufactured during the campaign to have the same brochure appeal as all the other garbage we see. DemocracyNet gives you power to compare, but what you're comparing is sales pitches. We'd like to compare facts about political issues.

So how do we compare facts? First, I'd like to see major issues (e.g. "Abortion", "Gun Control") broken down into specific multiple-choice questions ("Roe v. Wade: should we keep or overturn it?", "Assault rifles: allow or ban civilian purchase?"). Each candidate would then be paired with each issue. Clearly, the reductionist way that these questions are stated and structured makes it difficult to guarantee objectivity. Therefore, the Voter Support System would have to make available the identity of the researchers who selected the issues and interpreted the candidates' positions. Like a good academic paper, all references must be cited. Any visitor to the site should be able to contribute to the vetting process by issuing specific references that support or challenge the validity or applicability of a reference. And very importantly, there must be no aggregate or statistical reasoning. The system shouldn't tell me "266 people agree with this statement and 127 disagree," because that doesn't tell me if it's true or not. Majority opinions, especially on a website, do not correlate to factual accuracy and leave open a huge window for abuse.

Here's a mockup:

(Hover over a link to get more information on what that link will do.)

The Voter Support System would involve three major roles:

• readers, who view the position information for candidates and offer new resources that support or challenge certain interpretations of a candidate's position
• moderators, who screen out reader suggestions, but only ones that are obviously off-topic or spam
• researchers, who are tasked with verifying the accuracy of reader suggestions and, if accurate, classifying them on the candidate-issue tree

Readers can be anyone, including known biased sources such as competing campaigns; we evaluate specific arguments, not their messengers. Moderators are a mostly administrative function necessitated because of the web-based nature of this system, but still all their decisions should be subject to public review. Researchers must be a disciplined group devoted solely to evaluating the accuracy of claims from readers.

The reputation of the voter support system is staked primarily on the quality of its issues breakdown and the objectivity of its research. I wouldn't use a system that told me if candidates were for "tax relief", because "tax relief" is an abstract term with a loaded meaning—what kind of cruel person could be against relief?! The key is to stick to specifics and avoid opinion, and gather measurable data. To initially populate the issue tree with candidate stances, you'd want to do a vast media review. You might want to enslave a large cadre of grad students for this purpose.

Summary

The key assumption here is that voters want to vote based on rational facts, not hype or emotion. This may not be true for all voters, but it's how I'd like to vote, and I think there should be a system to help me do so.

• break down issues into specific, multiple-choice questions
• research positions of each candidate on each specific issue
• publish rationales, not statistics, for all position judgments
• solicit vetting of those judgments from readers
• research the accuracy of reader arguments and publish that research

Or in short, reduce to specific issues in a systematic, verifiable, open way.

Finally, a Solicitation

If you'd like to work with me on a system like this, I can do the technical side of it. But I'd need help with the issue structures and ongoing research. Email me.