Thursday, February 5, 2009

A new way of voting

Now that the election is over (except Minnesota) I thought I would take a few moments to tell you all one of the best ideas that came to me during the past election season. As with most good ideas they are not created in a total vacuum, but also through observation of others.

We now can only vote for someone. I think we should be able to vote against a candidate. When faced with a choice among candidates have you ever thought I could support anyone expect that one.

An example to illustrate my idea.

If there were 4 candidates and one, in your opinion, would be outstandingly bad but you could live with any of the other 3, why shouldn't you be able to cast a vote against the bad one?

  • Candidate 'A' 413,500 votes.
  • Candidate 'B' 339,785 votes.
  • Candidate 'C' 98,667 votes.
  • Candidate 'D' -87 votes.

With this way of voting, the winning candidate 'A' would feel confident that they have broad support since they either received a large number of positive votes signaling they were liked by a larger number of voters, or a large number of voters though candidate 'A' would be acceptable so they cast a vote against one of the other candidates.

It would also give a clear message to candidate 'D' that they should look for another line of work.

I think it could work.

Do any of you have ideas you would like to share?

Datadiver08

1 comment:

Amanda said...

Certain places (ahem, Minnesota) can't figure out regular voting... how on earth could they figure this out??