I’m going to propose a new voting process, at least for Presidential elections, but eventually to be phased in for all elections.
I recently read a survey from Tennessee that indicate that most voters could not correctly match the candidates with their policy perscriptions. As a result, it’s become clear to me that voters are not actually voting for candidates that they necessarily agree with, and for policies that they may not support. This strikes me as a major failing of democracy. After all, the candidate is less important than the policies that candidate plans to implement.
Therefore, all future ballots should eliminate the actual names of the candidates/policies. Instead, voters will now use a matrix to indicate their favorite issues, such as abortion, gun control, tax cuts, the balanced budget, the war on terrorism, etc., and their position on the issue (i.e. for or against). This will lead to a number between 0 and 100. Where the two candidates positions on an issue are measurabley similar, the issue will not be counted in the final tally, in order to provide us solely with contrasts. Each candidate, in the end, will be based at each end of the spectrum, and whomever has more ballots closer to his/her position based on the distribution wins the election.
This will enable us to move closer to voting on what really matters, the issues.