Showerthoughts @lemmy.world JamesStallion @sh.itjust.works 4w ago

We should have elections with no candidates.

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.

38 comments

And also with a randomized name/logo that changes at every election, so there's no more "i vote for that party because my family voted for them since 200 years ago, and i will still vote for them even if they want to do immoral things"
- What stops them from just saying what people want to hear, then doing what their party wants? There's no accountability because you wouldn't know that the party that lied last election is saying the same thing this election.
- Double blind democracy!
This is the idea behind direct ballot measures. Instead of working through representatives, just let people make actual decisions. Of course, there are problems with it. You wind up looking at a ballot with 10 different bond measures on it as if you’re in any position to decide on the budgets for 6 different agencies. And all the voter guides scream contradictory things at you from the pro/con positions, leaving you thinking “gee, maybe politician is actually a profession after all?”
I actually sort of like this idea. People would still figure it out, of course, but it'd shift people's default attention from the person to the platform.
I think the big issue with this is we would fall prey to the BS spin some parties like to push. Based on their stated goals like focusing on the family, workers rights, smaller government, you'd think they are a great option. But once you start yo listen to the candidates talk what you find out is that their entire list of selling points are made up and not at all what they want to push.

While i agree some of the personal life stuff is ridiculous, looking at how some of these politicians act in society we aee exactly what they will be doing when "representing" all of us. If the candidate is a horrible person I'd hope that people qould recognize that they will not service the people fairly. But post pandemic we have seen that there is a lot of really crappy people out there who used to just keep quiet about their horrible views, today they are just lacking shame.
- Hard disagree. It's really easy for candidates to talk the talk on the campaign trail, and then do a 180 once they're in office.
  
  That being said, this doesn't work if you let them use flowery speech and vague promises. If you had parties submit a platform of actually actionable decisions they would make (e.g. "decrease the federal minimum wage"), you'd be able to suss out what they actually want to do. It would also provide a rubric for re-election - how many of the things you wanted to do did you accomplish? Are there good reasons why you weren't able to?
  
  So what you're asking for is the party politic talking points they already publish and never actually vote for? We already have a party that says one thing and have voted consistently against their entire published position for a good 40+ years. I don't see much changing there.
  
  I think a better solution is to hold politicians feet to the fire. When they have debates play the clip of them from a rally stating they want to X horrible thing or where they just negated their previous statement. "You claim to he for a working wage but lets play the clip from CSPAN where you are against increasing minimum wage and call people working in fast food 'lazy and dumb'".
  
  Unfortunately a huge portion of voters dont care about actual facts and vote purely by ideology or religious views or are easily swept up in the propaganda l. We should be outlawing ads that are obvious false statements or try and bend the situation to look drastically different.
I mean. Not all. In lots of parliamentary democracies people vote far more for the policies/party than the name.

We don’t even have a head of the executive in Switzerland like you do with your president in the US. It’s a 7 person council.
- I am not American, but I think my statement can be said to be true of the US, UK, France, Canada, Spain and Italy at the very least since these are countries whose recent elections I have followed a bit.
  
  Your contradicter is right. You're basically describing the list system, which is the purest form of PR and pretty common in Europe. You vote for a platform and a list, not for individuals.
  
  So except for Spain and Italy, the few countries that have single member electoral districts which means you vote for candidates instead of party lists?
each party

Who decides who is a "party"?
- Large corporate donors decide, in a non-representative winner-take-all vote system.
  
  Also, I think they meant to say "both parties".
I think that would be great - if people were incapable of lying. As it is, the candidate with the most people-pleasing program (true or not) would win and you wouldn't be able to check their past activities to see whether they're trustworthy at all.
Have you heard of liquid democracy?
Proportional representation is pretty close. You still vote a specific politician, but the vote benefits everyone in that party. Basically this means that you really need to read what the party is trying to accomplish and pick the one you like the most. Then you’ll pick your favorite candidate in that party, and cast your vote.
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.
- 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.
All us....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 just.....don't though

Even if we did it'd be drowned out by the utter drivel spewing out of the one country that does
Someday, we will vote for sentient AI candidates.
Let's just rollback to monarchy tbh. Anything beats these little marketing contests at this point.

38 comments