All us WEIRD (western educated industrialized rich democratic) countries seem to spend a really embarrassing amount of time talking about the pointless minutiae surrounding our candidates for office and their personal lives.
We are also prone to backing very crap candidates based on personality, rhetoric, appearance ie: things that have nothing to do with being a good executive or legislator.
I think we should ban names from the election process and just have each party submit their ideas in writing and let people vote based on those submissions.
Yes. You should be presented with a set of multiple choice questions where the answers are each of the parties stances on the matter and at the end your vote should be divided among the parties based on how you answered the questions.
That won’t really work. Had an exact thing in an unofficial capacity - more along the lines of “answer the questions to see what party you align with most”. The result - the biggest lying traitor shitbags were the match.
Declared views != actual views.
I guess the pandering people pleasing approaches would overly benefit from this design but it could be more realistic if you showed a percentage next to the answer of the likelihood that the party will follow through with the statement based on their previous claims and achievements. This would make the parties less willing to make false claims or go back on their promises once in power because it would reflect badly in the next election.
Who determines the percentage?
People have access to the information now to know who the liars are, but they choose to ignore it.
I think it could be as simple as party x claims they will do thing a, b, c and then after their term in power you assess if they achieved those things. The parties who make the claims will need to back up those claims with real milestones that would become performance indicators of partial or full success. The milestones must be easy to assess and leave no room for interpretation. Just like in a legal contract, if you make the wording too vague and hard to interpret, then your contract won’t be enforceable in court.
I tried one of those surveys before the last election, and it concluded that I was most closely aligned with the Green Party. Alas, they don’t have a chance in Hell where I am. They are so far off the radar I wasn’t even aware they were fielding a candidate in my district. But it does make me wonder though. If such surveys actually informed how people vote, would the balance of power shift? I think it would help if our voting system (I’m in Canada) changed to something other than first-past-the-post?
Moving away from FPTP is, for democracy, the crucial first step that very few seem to have taken.
That would require parties to follow through on their platforms to work.
For example, Republicans say they value life but do the opposite by forcing women to die because they can’t access medical care for unviable pregnancies. They say they want border reform but vote against bills that would fund the courts that process immigrants. They say they willl lower taxes for the common person, but lower it for the top 1% and raise them for everyone else.
Platforms are great and all if they meant anything.
See my response above that takes this into consideration.