It’s been about a week since the federal election was called in Canada.  As part of their election coverage, the CBC has published Vote Compass, designed to show Canadians which party’s political views are closest to their own. Several issues with this tool have been pointed out.  I think an interesting flaw was pointed out by Queen’s University professor Kathy Brock. She tried the survey three times; the first selecting “somewhat agree” for everything, the second “somewhat disagree” for everything, and the third “strongly agree for everything. Each time the survey scored the results as being closest to the Liberal party (the article didn’t say what the results were if you strongly disagreed with everything, but I tried it out myself and the result was also Liberal).

The people that designed the survey pointed out that the questions were split between the left and right of the political spectrum, so if you answer all of the questions the same you’ll answer half to the left and half to the right, which presumably averages out to the centre, which presumably corresponds to being a Liberal (only in Canada). Fair enough; if you are an independent thinker and have these half-left-wing, half-right-wing views, possibly you’d be happy with a party that’s in the middle rather than a party that drives you up the wall 50% of the time.

Let’s assume that there are two hypothetical voters out there, one of whose opinions is such that he/she would answer “strongly agree” to each of the CBC’s questions, and the other would answer “strongly disagree” to each question. Further assume that they take the advice of the CBC’s survey and both vote Liberal. Now, if the Liberals were to win the election (which I doubt, but this is all hypothetical (-: ). Now, the Liberals can only take one position on each issue. Since these two voters have opposite views on every issue, at least one of these two people is going to be unhappy with every action that the Liberals take, even though both of these people voted Liberal and even though the Liberal party is closest to both of these people’s views.

This isn’t something that only happens in fantasyland; it happens in real life as well. No doubt, assuming you’re old enough and occasionally vote for political parties that win, you’ve had the disillusioning experience of voting for some party or another, the party getting elected, and then the party doing all kinds of things you don’t like. This isn’t because the party decided to break all of its election promises. It’s because there are so many issues and the party simply can’t have the same views as you do all of the time.

I think that this disillusionment is the cause of a fair bit of of voter apathy, another topic that is often in the news around this time of year. Who wouldn’t get tired of year after year of voting and then not have the party in power doing what you want?

I feel that this is a problem that technology can solve. Looking back to the dawn of democracy in ancient Greece, the people (well, at least those people who were citizens) would participate in the political process directly, instead of electing representatives to participate for them.  This would require that those participating in the democratic process spend a significant amount of time away from their farm or their profession, which was rather inconvenient. Thus was born the practice of electing political representatives, instead of people representing themselves. However, in a world where people vote for their favourites on Dancing With the Stars and American Idol every week, it seems way too infrequent for people to only have one chance to voice their political opinions every three or four or five years.

It doesn’t seem likely that we can just immediately ditch the existing political machine and replace it with one where people directly represent themselves electronically. On the other hand, I think that, with modern technology, it would be important to create something where the general public can actually influence government decisions. I think that the best way to start would be to create various votes along the lines of referendums (referenda?), which bind the government to taking some action or another based on the result of the vote. These should be held online in a manner that it’s not prohibitively expensive to hold. We should probably start with matters that aren’t too significant, as I’m sure there will be flaws in the system to start. I suspect that giving people this sort of direct involvement will stimulate their interest in politics, and turn “voter apathy” into a thing of the past.