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[Folly]

Voting is quite important.

Voting is quite important for those who live in swing states. For the rest, it's really just a symbolic gesture.

[Bumber]

Voting is quite important.

Voting is quite important for those who live in swing states. For the rest, it's really just a symbolic gesture.

There's more to voting than presidential elections.

[SalmonGod]

You're right. I've done more reading.

My hat's off to you, sir, and I'm sorry if I came off aggressively in that last post.

[Trekkin]

Voting is quite important.

Voting is quite important for those who live in swing states. For the rest, it's really just a symbolic gesture.

No matter where you are, voting gives everyone reliable information on how your area stands politically. That's really important in allocating resources to campaigns as demographics shift, and polls tend to happen after those shifts get detected, because pollsters care more about close races. A vote is about the only time everyone gets polled.

If you don't vote, you're not just irrelevant. You're invisible.

[SalmonGod]

Voting is quite important.

Voting is quite important for those who live in swing states. For the rest, it's really just a symbolic gesture.

No matter where you are, voting gives everyone reliable information on how your area stands politically. That's really important in allocating resources to campaigns as demographics shift, and polls tend to happen after those shifts get detected, because pollsters care more about close races. A vote is about the only time everyone gets polled.

If you don't vote, you're not just irrelevant. You're invisible.

You just pointed out what I see as the biggest problem with the pressure to vote, though.  If you're unhappy with Democrats but leveraged into voting for them anyway by lesser evil logic, then how are they supposed to get the message that you're not happy with them?  Or even care, if you just proved to them that they've got your vote anyway?  If you're only given two candidates and you don't align very well with either of them, how does voting for either of them indicate where you stand politically?

This is why I've voted Green every opportunity I get, even if I know the specific candidate isn't good.  At least I'm providing better feedback on what my priorities are.

[wierd]

Ideally, this is the niche that public opinion polls during election time are SUPPOSED to fill, but really, it just is the prelude to being called nonstop for several weeks.

I would rather that there be some kind of voluntary public opinion mechanism. (Perhaps a website?) Something that validates the person making the statement, and permits only one statement (to avoid abuse of the system), but is otherwise painless to use.  Lets the responder say exactly what they want.

The sad thing though, is that the demographics and statistics people dont like "Human responses" with their grey areas, specific language, etc. They want easily parsed "This box, that box, OR that OTHER box" responses.  Not responses like "Seriously-- You guys gave me the choice between the dirty ex-con, the child sex predator, and manchurian candidate. This forced me to pick the dirty ex-con. For fucks sake, stop this, and give me a proper candidate."

[Folly]

I would rather that there be some kind of voluntary public opinion mechanism. (Perhaps a website?)

Website would be a good start. Smartphone voting app would also be great.
Sadly, there are a lot of(unfounded) fears about hackers influencing elections right now. Whichever party is more likely to win at the ballot box will stoke those fears to ensure that no electronic voting system is ever implemented, and thus their advantage cannot be challenged.

Seriously-- You guys gave me the choice between the dirty ex-con, the child sex predator, and manchurian candidate. This forced me to pick the dirty ex-con. For fucks sake, stop this, and give me a proper candidate.

Proper candidates by their very nature can never compete with corrupt candidates. Such is the nature of the beast.

[Trekkin]

Ideally, this is the niche that public opinion polls during election time are SUPPOSED to fill, but really, it just is the prelude to being called nonstop for several weeks.

I would rather that there be some kind of voluntary public opinion mechanism. (Perhaps a website?) Something that validates the person making the statement, and permits only one statement (to avoid abuse of the system), but is otherwise painless to use.  Lets the responder say exactly what they want.

The sad thing though, is that the demographics and statistics people dont like "Human responses" with their grey areas, specific language, etc. They want easily parsed "This box, that box, OR that OTHER box" responses.  Not responses like "Seriously-- You guys gave me the choice between the dirty ex-con, the child sex predator, and manchurian candidate. This forced me to pick the dirty ex-con. For fucks sake, stop this, and give me a proper candidate."

Okay, wierd, go be the change you want to see. I know you have the technological acumen to set up a website where anyone can say any one thing they like about the current state of our politics, and you apparently possess some ability to draw statistically meaningful conclusions from unstructured (and frequently unprintable) text that professional statisticians do not. Demonstrate that algorithm with sufficient rigor and reproducibility, and the insights you produce will be in high demand -- certainly in sufficient demand for you to find a way to finance the hardware for a full-scale implementation without compromising any of your ethical principles vis-a-vis the free availability of the data.

[smjjames]

I would rather that there be some kind of voluntary public opinion mechanism. (Perhaps a website?)

Website would be a good start. Smartphone voting app would also be great.
Sadly, there are a lot of(unfounded) fears about hackers influencing elections right now. Whichever party is more likely to win at the ballot box will stoke those fears to ensure that no electronic voting system is ever implemented, and thus their advantage cannot be challenged.

The other problem is that you have to make sure that every comment on the public opinion mechanism is from a human and there is a very real possibility of it getting flooded with comment bots. This happened with the FCC comment proccess on Net Neutrality.

Seriously-- You guys gave me the choice between the dirty ex-con, the child sex predator, and manchurian candidate. This forced me to pick the dirty ex-con. For fucks sake, stop this, and give me a proper candidate.

Proper candidates by their very nature can never compete with corrupt candidates. Such is the nature of the beast.

Such is the paradox of dealing with Trump, it's hard to fight him without going to his level. Though Clinton did well, maybe if she wasn't a terrible candidate with a metaphorical traincar load of political baggage....

[Dozebôm Lolumzalìs]

Ideally, this is the niche that public opinion polls during election time are SUPPOSED to fill, but really, it just is the prelude to being called nonstop for several weeks.

I would rather that there be some kind of voluntary public opinion mechanism. (Perhaps a website?) Something that validates the person making the statement, and permits only one statement (to avoid abuse of the system), but is otherwise painless to use.  Lets the responder say exactly what they want.

The sad thing though, is that the demographics and statistics people dont like "Human responses" with their grey areas, specific language, etc. They want easily parsed "This box, that box, OR that OTHER box" responses.  Not responses like "Seriously-- You guys gave me the choice between the dirty ex-con, the child sex predator, and manchurian candidate. This forced me to pick the dirty ex-con. For fucks sake, stop this, and give me a proper candidate."

Okay, wierd, go be the change you want to see. I know you have the technological acumen to set up a website where anyone can say any one thing they like about the current state of our politics, and you apparently possess some ability to draw statistically meaningful conclusions from unstructured (and frequently unprintable) text that professional statisticians do not. Demonstrate that algorithm with sufficient rigor and reproducibility, and the insights you produce will be in high demand -- certainly in sufficient demand for you to find a way to finance the hardware for a full-scale implementation without compromising any of your ethical principles vis-a-vis the free availability of the data.

weird: "People are saying things but it's hard to collect and do statistics on the things they're saying. Maybe we should find some way to collect what they're saying."

Trekkin: "Oh, so you're saying the statistics isn't that hard? Why not go get your Nobel prize equivalent then?"

You're missing the point.

(It's possible I've misunderstood you. If so, it's unintentional and please clarify.)

[Folly]

A website that verifies people's real identities to avoid spam-bots would likely require the cooperation of the government. Like, make people register using their social security numbers or something. It likely would not be all that difficult for a talented website designer to set up given the necessary resources, but getting access to those resources is the trick.

[smjjames]

And there would be the whole deal with keeping said social security number data from being hacked.

Still, the FCC is a government agency and even they were unable to stop (or maybe they just didn't care) the comments section from being filled with spambots. Course though, I don't know what verification (if any) proccess they use.

[Trekkin]

(It's possible I've misunderstood you. If so, it's unintentional and please clarify.)

Extracting and aggregating politically useful information from unstructured text is not the problem per se; natural language processing as a whole is still an area of active research, but the conclusions we're trying to draw here are broad enough for the tools we have to get us most of the way. It's just that those responses aren't likely to contain the information you want in the first place at a meaningful scale. Freeform response invites both memes (how many people do you think will include the phrase "Make America Great Again"? Do they mean anything by it? Do they actually want to "lock her up"?) and rants about anything and everything they don't like, and what's more, you won't get the same rant day to day so it's difficult to track what issues matter over time this way. Today they filled up their gas tank so it's gas prices; tomorrow's hot so it'll be climate change. People have opinions about so many things they don't remember until you prompt them that any kind of serendipitous coverage of the population is hopeless. This is discounting how free text can exacerbate expressive responding and outright lying and how often people just use words incorrectly.

It's not so much that we can't separate the signal from the noise as that the right signal isn't even there to be found reproducibly. People are going to look at this dataset and ask "so what does everyone think of politician X or law Y" and the vast majority of responses just won't contain anything relevant to that.

EDIT: Just to be clear, though, I do think it's legitimately worth a try if only because if it fails to achieve its aims (as I think likely) it's likely to do so in an informative way.

[PTTG??]

The problem with electronic voting is purely that electronic voting companies are incompetent and corrupt to a comical degree. Their technology can be hacked by sneezing on it, for the most part.

I'm pretty much at the point that we need massively parallel voting counting.

Instead of a private ballot, ballots would be public and voting would include a crytographically secured receipt. At the voting place, four or five separate companies would count the votes and record the totals in secret. After voting has closed, the companies open their voting calcuations and people can use their receipt to ensure their vote was counted correctly. If there is a discrepency between the company's results, there is a recount until the cause is found, and punishments may be leveled for failure to record votes accurately.

The downside of this is that we lose the private ballot. I don't accept that loss lightly; there are places where anonymous voting is the only thing allowing people to speak freely. However, any election that is competitive (and thus worth voting meaningfully in) would be one with at least two mostly equal parties. If the parties are of similar size, they are, at least, less likely to suppress one annother publically.

[SalmonGod]

Why don't we just add the word blockchain to it?  That makes everything technology better, right?