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.
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”
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 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.
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’m asking for the individual candidates to lay out their specific political goals. The party can continue to publish its platform and planks.
Then people vote based on whether they want to see those goals met. When those politicians are up for re-election, it’s fairly easy for someone to tabulate whether or not those goals were met. If there are extenuating circumstances (overwhelming opposition, for example), then they can use that to defend themselves. This would help hold their feet to the fire.
As for voting ideologically, I attribute that mostly to FPTP - people feel as though they cannot do anything but vote ideologically because there are no real alternatives. That’s why RCV is extremely important.
