I want to bring into the Foreground, a different method for candidacy election - the idea of principle-based and point-based elections. We've seen the sort of systems that are established among various countries. The binding philosophy behind my proposed election system is "Choosing who is right based on principle alone". We've seen with examples like Estonia, countries that have installed more forward-facing systems by capitalizing on the booming trend of technology - utilizing the Internet as a means of election. I want to extend this idea a bit further. In all cases across the nations, we instill an election system that is based purely on favorability of a candidate founded strongly upon candate personality. Of course, favorability should always be the lowest common denominator when electing governing officials; but as many Americans are suddenly now becoming aware of the flaws of the American election system and forced to vote between candidates that don't quite align with their personal beliefs, values, and ideologies. I want to return to the YouTube video of the Joe Scarborough/Mark Halperin debate at the beginning of this essay. This 2016 election process has brought into the limelight the limitations of the American election system. As Joe Scarborough claims in regards to the democratic presidential primaries where Hillary Clinton loses the popular vote to Bernie Sanders 56% to 44% in Wyoming: "They select somebody by 12 percentage points, and end up letting the other candidate who lost by 12 percentage points, win the most delegates. That, by definition, is voter disenfranchisement." Joe is referring to lack of voter representation as "voter disenfranchisement" - by the Democratic National Convention and the electoral college. It's rather sad to hear Mark Halperin's lethargic response: "These are the rules".
In America, we don't actually have as much control over the selection of our presidential candidates than is generally propagated when we loftily talk about our "model" democracy. This is to say that we talk about our system as being a true democracy yet what we actually have established is more like a governing oligarchy. Our election relies on an electoral college or a representative body to select our presidential candidates. This means we elect representatives - who supposedly have our interests in mind - do our voting for us. It's no surprise that the majority of those in the video are outraged by the misrepresentation of public interest by governing officials. This marks yet another pivotal moment in American voting history as the flaws of the electoral college system is brought to attention in mainstream news.
Now to the Foreground, I want to first propose a principle-and-point-based system to elect our governing officials based on several contributing factors: 1) beliefs, values, ideology, and principle; and 2) experience and credibility. Taking Estonia as an exemplary model toward creating a technological infrastructure, I propose that we move toward an online voting environment. This will negate the inability for voters to fit the act of casting a ballot into their busy schedules and facilitate the voting process by allowing voters to vote virtually anywhere. This infrastructure would require that the government maintain and secure the online infrastructure. I want to focus less on the logistical requirements of this sort of management and instead focus on what the ballot would actually look like.
As I have mentioned earlier, this type of election system should place a strong emphasis on principle-based elections. The ballot, for voters, will take on the appearance of a questionnaire - providing multiple choice or yes/no questions that will be represented by currently trending issues and/or the state of current affairs. With the existence of the online infrastructure, voters should have the option of voting at any time throughout the election year with a designated cutoff date for their votes to count. The integrity of this sort of principle-based system hinges on the mandatory participation of candidates who seek election. Each voter, in this portion of the system, will vote by completing the questionnaire; the votes of the voters are then archived anonymously and compared against the questionnaires of other voters at the cutoff date. Using an algorithm to generate data portraying the areas of greatest public concern as evidenced by the questionnaires, we can use a matching algorithm to determine which governing-official-hopeful most closely resembles the interests of the voters. In order to account for experience and credibility of each candidate, at the end of each voter's questionnaire, there should be presented a series of multiple choice questions asking voters to select among various candidate profiles - profiles that are portrayed anonymously. Voters would analyze these profiles and choose whose profile most closely align with the their views on the qualities and characteristics that an elected official should represent. This sort of system implies a sort of blind voting system with its foundation upon selecting the most electable candidate. In this sort of principle-based system, we are placing high priority on personal/candidate belief systems, principle and value systems, and political ideologies. The questions at the end of the questionnaire are meant to account for particular experience and credibility. Let's now discuss the point system.
The point system is a manifestation of the questionnaire format of my proposed election system. We may look to the methodologies being applied by our American schools and universities to create a standardized pointing system. Each question in the questionnaire could be worth one point. After collecting all of the votes, the answer to each particular question will be determined to be "correct" based upon majority votes. Election candidates, then, must have had chosen that same answer - the majority answer - to score one point. When we get to the the experience and credibility section of the questionnaire, the candidate who earns the majority vote for each candidate-profile question will earn one point. In this proposed system, the question remains: "How should we handle the logistics for planning such a system?"
I turn to you now. What do you think about this principle-point-based system? How many principled questions do you think should be on the questionnaire versus candidate-profile questions? Who should develop the questions for the questionnaire? Do you have any reactions toward Joe Scarborough's use of the word "disenfranchisement" to represent the American electoral system? Were their any government practices around the world that you found to be appealing? Do you have any proposed systems you want to bring to the Foreground? Let me know in the comments below.
A "Rigged" System
By now you may be tired of hearing any more discussion on the political environment of the 2016 election. At this stage, the 2016 election fever has cooled down a bit with voters looking further down the line at casting their votes on Election Day. Whether you saw this on your television or on YouTube, you probably noticed the palpable tension that arose between Joe Scarborough and Mark Halperin. Their debate and the general disposition about the whole election year seems to represent a point in American political history where citizens are taking a more significant notice that the American system is a system with fractures - one that Joe Scarborough colloquially conjectures to be a "rigged" system. You'd be hard-pressed to find anyone who believes the American system is a perfect system. In the past decade or so, there has been a steady rise of complaints about our election system: the hanging chads of the 2000 Gore/Bush election, voter ID laws, long lines, untrain polling workers, the electoral college, malfunctioning machinery, and voter fraud from both the left and right sides of American politics (in 2008, John McCain and the Republican National Committee accused ACORN - a community-organizing group - of generating phony voter registration cards in at least eight states).
Voter-turnout: The United States Inside and Out
Let's begin with the data.
The graph above is from research generated by the Pew Research Center with intention for comparing voter-turnout among the 34 countries within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). The method applied for capturing voter-turnout is to measure turnout by narrowing in on the percentage of eligible voters. They collect their data based on two separate factors of voter eligibility: 1) those eligible to vote based on age, and 2) those eligible to vote based on voter registration. It's important to note that these factors do not account for all of the other factors that result in voter ineligibility like citizenship, imprisonment, residency rules, and other legal barriers. Nonetheless the data serves useful in providing a general mapping of how the U.S. fairs among other countries in the OECD. Based on these findings, the U.S. has some mixed reviews. The graph shows the U.S. having 53.6% voter-turnout based on those eligible to vote at the legal age stipulation - ranking the U.S. at fourth to last among the 34 other countries (among the OECD countries, Belgium (87.2%); Turkey (86.4%); and Sweden (82.6%) had the highest voter-turnout by the legal age factor - Switzerland (40%) had the lowest). This sort of voter-turnout is dismal with the shared mainstream perspective that the election system in America is flawed - too difficult or complicated to vote, people either don't care or don't see the value of their vote, or people don't have the time to vote. It's not all bad though, while the U.S. ranks 31st of 34 OECD countries, the Pew Research Center casts the U.S. with a 84.3% voter-turnout for those who had registered to vote in 2012. This result though should be marked with some skepticism as the subcontext is that registered voters represent a much smaller number of potential voters in the U.S. than just about any other OECD country. According to the Census Bureau, only 65% of the U.S. eligible voters by age is registered to vote. This is also under the assumption that those who took the time to register to vote are the ones that actually want to vote. Another report from TheSlateGroup by Juliet Lapidosreports in 2008, out of 172 countries, the U.S. ranks 139th in voter-turnout. Scott Keyes from the Center for American Progress Action Fund records, "If the United States and all other countries of the world were to line up by voter participation rate, we would find ourselves ranked lower than war-torn countries like Sierra Leone, massive countries like Indonesia, and baby democracies like East Timor." What are the causes for a first-world country to be ranked so low you might be wondering.
The World at the Ballot
Juliet Lapidos sums this up in one concise argument: "the United States is one of just a few democracies where the government takes a back seat, expecting individuals to sign themselves up to vote." Other countries take a much more bureaucratic and/or mandated approach, such as Sweden and France. The Swedes maintain a national database that includes the name, address, place of birth, and marital status of each individual. The Swedish Tax Administration is responsible for updates to the database. Using the information of citizens within this database, they compile an electoral roll for each district. Each eligible voter then receives proof of registration which contains the address and hours of operation for their polling station. Sweden, like France, registers each citizen automatically. Canada takes a much more sensible approach toward allowing their citizens to become registered voters. They allow their citizens to register to vote on Election Day at their polling centers rather than prohibiting citizens to vote if they have yet to register.
Other issues with the American election system have to do with when the elections take place and the fragmentation of the electoral process. In the U.S., we vote for our president on a single day in November on the first Tuesday proceeding the first Monday of the month. This generally conflicts with most people's work schedule - placing a logistical impedance on voters. Many countries including Australia, Greece, and Brazil hold their elections on the weekend when people generally have more time. "In 1845, Congress fixed upon Tuesday because getting to and from polling places used to be a two-day ordeal, and voting on the weekend or Monday would have meant traveling on the Sabbath" and henceforth came the birth of Election Day in America. Reasonably, this should be a simple impedance to overcome, much easier than restructuring the electoral process for representation.
In America, we are required to vote for federal elections and local elections on different dates. Other countries have a much more succinct electoral process. They vote for both federal and local elections on a single day, making voting for representation by every voter possible in one outing. This avoids the woes and pitfalls of voter fatigue.
Some argue that the poor voter-turnout in America is due to a lack of a compulsory voting system. A compulsory system is a electoral system that mandates its citizens to vote as a right to citizenship or a matter of civic responsibility. In some of the countries that enact a compulsory system, voting in elections is regulated by the national constitution and/or electoral laws. These laws are sometimes enforced by imposing sanctions upon non-voters. We can look at countries like Belgium, Argentina, Australia, Uruguay, Dominican Republic, Singapore, Greece, and Chile to see how the compulsory system affects voter-turnout. Let's examine the differences and trends among countries with a compulsory electoral system and those without, in the graphic below:
It appears so that the compulsory is a rather uncommon practice internationally yet we see a 7.37% difference in voting behavior. Whether this percentage is significant depends on your attitude toward casting a ballot as a means of civic responsibility. An estimated 744 million people live in nations with compulsory voting laws. Evidence for the effectiveness of compulsory law is a bit ambiguous. Greece, despite having a compulsory voting system, has seen voter-turnout fall from 89% in 2000 to 72% in 2015. This is in contrast to Chile, which has seen voter-turnout plunge from 87% in 2010 to 42% in 2013 after segueing from a compulsory system to a voluntary system. The leading argument against a compulsory system is that infringes upon the freedom characteristic of a true democracy. Other arguments are much more economically founded. The Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance presents these claims: "Many countries with limited financial capacity may not be able to justify the expenditures of maintaining and enforcing compulsory voting laws. It has been proved that forcing the population to vote results in an increased number of invalid and blank votes compared to countries that have no compulsory voting laws." The act of enacting a compulsory system is a reformation that would probably require bureaucracies to manage and regulate that system. This means that part of our federal budget and the tax-payer money would have to be dedicated toward maintaining and enforcing such a system. For the United States, this doesn't appear to be such a financial burden. The other argument related to the quality of each vote seems to highlight a much more significant issue with the compulsory system. In compulsory systems, ballots are often found invalid or blank and consists of "random" voting. Voters in this system who have no interest in politics or lack knowledge on a particular proposition or candidate may cast their vote at random - which is frequently found to be a vote for the first candidate name on the ballot. Those arguing for the compulsory system have a more optimistic view of the system. They claim that compulsory systems, in forcing citizens to participate in constructing their government, have an inherent and subtle educational effect on its citizens. Still, the research conducted on compulsory systems is rooted upon a small sample size, and should be consumed with a grain of salt.
The most significant electoral system that I want to bring into the attention to is the practice of online voting. Most of Internet voting today is in the experimental phase with the first use of Internet voting for a political election taking place in 2000 in the U.S. Other countries have began their own trials for online voting for various political elections. The National Democratic Institute has reported: "A total of 14 countries have now used remote Internet voting for binding political elections. Within the group of Internet voting system users, four core countries have been using Internet voting over the course of several elections." The several countries that have integrated an Internet-based system are: Australia, Canada, Estonia, France, Finland, Norway, and Switzerland. Most notable of this group is Estonia which allows its citizens to cast a ballot for the entire electorate via the Internet. Estonia was the first country, in 2007, to hold a general online election. In the course of three days, Estonians may vote by placing their state-issued ID cards - containing an electronic chip - into a computer card reader and then entering in two passwords. After security clearance, they are presented with a list of favorite candidates. The votes are then encrypted and stripped of personally identifiable information. With justifiable concern, the slow progress of holding Internet elections generally stems from the subversions of computer technologies and Internet security. These concerns are expressed by the general public who worry that Estonia's online voting system would be vulnerable to hacking, yet Estonia has yet to face any major security breaches with their online system. In fact, surveys conducted after the online election process found high voter confidence in their election results. As Eric Weiner from TheSlateGroup states in 2006: "Europeans tend to trust their private information with governments, not corporations."
INTO THE FOREGROUND: Principle-based/Point-based Election
I want to bring into the Foreground, a different method for candidacy election - the idea of principle-based and point-based elections. We've seen the sort of systems that are established among various countries. The binding philosophy behind my proposed election system is "Choosing who is right based on principle alone". We've seen with examples like Estonia, countries that have installed more forward-facing systems by capitalizing on the booming trend of technology - utilizing the Internet as a means of election. I want to extend this idea a bit further. In all cases across the nations, we instill an election system that is based purely on favorability of a candidate founded strongly upon candate personality. Of course, favorability should always be the lowest common denominator when electing governing officials; but as many Americans are suddenly now becoming aware of the flaws of the American election system and forced to vote between candidates that don't quite align with their personal beliefs, values, and ideologies. I want to return to the YouTube video of the Joe Scarborough/Mark Halperin debate at the beginning of this essay. This 2016 election process has brought into the limelight the limitations of the American election system. As Joe Scarborough claims in regards to the democratic presidential primaries where Hillary Clinton loses the popular vote to Bernie Sanders 56% to 44% in Wyoming: "They select somebody by 12 percentage points, and end up letting the other candidate who lost by 12 percentage points, win the most delegates. That, by definition, is voter disenfranchisement." Joe is referring to lack of voter representation as "voter disenfranchisement" - by the Democratic National Convention and the electoral college. It's rather sad to hear Mark Halperin's lethargic response: "These are the rules".
In America, we don't actually have as much control over the selection of our presidential candidates than is generally propagated when we loftily talk about our "model" democracy. This is to say that we talk about our system as being a true democracy yet what we actually have established is more like a governing oligarchy. Our election relies on an electoral college or a representative body to select our presidential candidates. This means we elect representatives - who supposedly have our interests in mind - do our voting for us. It's no surprise that the majority of those in the video are outraged by the misrepresentation of public interest by governing officials. This marks yet another pivotal moment in American voting history as the flaws of the electoral college system is brought to attention in mainstream news.
Now to the Foreground, I want to first propose a principle-and-point-based system to elect our governing officials based on several contributing factors: 1) beliefs, values, ideology, and principle; and 2) experience and credibility. Taking Estonia as an exemplary model toward creating a technological infrastructure, I propose that we move toward an online voting environment. This will negate the inability for voters to fit the act of casting a ballot into their busy schedules and facilitate the voting process by allowing voters to vote virtually anywhere. This infrastructure would require that the government maintain and secure the online infrastructure. I want to focus less on the logistical requirements of this sort of management and instead focus on what the ballot would actually look like.
As I have mentioned earlier, this type of election system should place a strong emphasis on principle-based elections. The ballot, for voters, will take on the appearance of a questionnaire - providing multiple choice or yes/no questions that will be represented by currently trending issues and/or the state of current affairs. With the existence of the online infrastructure, voters should have the option of voting at any time throughout the election year with a designated cutoff date for their votes to count. The integrity of this sort of principle-based system hinges on the mandatory participation of candidates who seek election. Each voter, in this portion of the system, will vote by completing the questionnaire; the votes of the voters are then archived anonymously and compared against the questionnaires of other voters at the cutoff date. Using an algorithm to generate data portraying the areas of greatest public concern as evidenced by the questionnaires, we can use a matching algorithm to determine which governing-official-hopeful most closely resembles the interests of the voters. In order to account for experience and credibility of each candidate, at the end of each voter's questionnaire, there should be presented a series of multiple choice questions asking voters to select among various candidate profiles - profiles that are portrayed anonymously. Voters would analyze these profiles and choose whose profile most closely align with the their views on the qualities and characteristics that an elected official should represent. This sort of system implies a sort of blind voting system with its foundation upon selecting the most electable candidate. In this sort of principle-based system, we are placing high priority on personal/candidate belief systems, principle and value systems, and political ideologies. The questions at the end of the questionnaire are meant to account for particular experience and credibility. Let's now discuss the point system.
The point system is a manifestation of the questionnaire format of my proposed election system. We may look to the methodologies being applied by our American schools and universities to create a standardized pointing system. Each question in the questionnaire could be worth one point. After collecting all of the votes, the answer to each particular question will be determined to be "correct" based upon majority votes. Election candidates, then, must have had chosen that same answer - the majority answer - to score one point. When we get to the the experience and credibility section of the questionnaire, the candidate who earns the majority vote for each candidate-profile question will earn one point. In this proposed system, the question remains: "How should we handle the logistics for planning such a system?"
I turn to you now. What do you think about this principle-point-based system? How many principled questions do you think should be on the questionnaire versus candidate-profile questions? Who should develop the questions for the questionnaire? Do you have any reactions toward Joe Scarborough's use of the word "disenfranchisement" to represent the American electoral system? Were their any government practices around the world that you found to be appealing? Do you have any proposed systems you want to bring to the Foreground? Let me know in the comments below.
Source Citations
-- "Compulsory Voting." Institute of Democracy and Electoral Assistance. 26 February 2016. Web. 30 July 2016.
-- Keyes, Scott. "Seven Voting Reforms Other Countries Have Used To Boost Their Turnout Rate." Center for American Progress Action Fund. 15 May 2013. Web. 30 July 2016.
-- Lapidos, Juliet. "Doing Democracy Right - Why are other countries so much better at conducting elections than we are?" TheSlateGroup. 17 October 2008. Web. 30 July 2016.
As I sit at the Starbucks at E 75th St. and 1st Ave. in Manhattan, New York - I'm reminded of a realization from a conversation with my father: "The coming future is weird and I believe that to be a direct effect of our existence in the present." What I mean is: there is evidence toward the trajectory of our future as a species - wild approximations in science that predict that future generations will lead lives that appear alien to us now. Take for instance, the existence of test-tube babies or in vitro fertilization. In vitro or "in glass" fertilization is a process by which an egg is fertilized by a sperm outside a woman's womb. The process involves the monitoring and stimulation of a woman's ovulatory process, then removing the ovum or "egg" from the woman's ovaries and allowing sperm to fertilize the egg in a liquid under a controlled laboratory setting. The fertilized zygote is cultured for 2-6 days in a growth medium and then transferred to the same or another woman's uterus to complete a successful pregnancy for couples who may be experiencing difficulties with the pregnancy process. We already see the existence of this sort of birthing process in our modern lives, but this sort of science can be developed further and assimilated with more frequency. The normal birthing process, as we know it, still has a mother's ovum being fertilized by a father's sperm within the mother's womb and undergoing the crowning birth canal pregnancy. From the vantage point of a member of a future generation, this sort of birthing process may appear time-consuming and, quite literally and pun-intended, labor intensive. That citizen of the future may look back at our society and view us as barbaric - similar to the way we view any homo-sapien ancestor or even any former civilization prior to our own. Imagine that we take this science a bit further and remove the process of requiring that the fertilized zygote be reinserted into the mother or her surrogate. Might it be, that in the future, we develop a synthetic womb whereby the zygote may be nourished and grown healthily into an infant? As some of you are reading this, you may find this conjecture to be extremely bizarre; and I want to comfort you by saying now that I do not harbor any negative judgements to your reaction. Although I would like to mention a potential benefit to this seemingly absurd birthing process. Surely you can agree that this birthing process would alleviate the painful experience endured by the mother in a crowning-birthing process and free up some time for the mother to resume her normal day-to-day activities.What I'm attempting to offer is an example of a practice that we might unconsciously overlook, but may one day be the common practice in our society. Again, the quote that I find difficult to shake and I say a bit humorously now: "The coming future is weird and I believe that to be a direct effect of our existence in the present."
I grew up as a first-generation American to Vietnamese family. My parents had emigrated from Vietnam to America as a result of the Vietnam War, and I am grateful that they did so. I was raised with the floating notion that this was their gift to me - a chance to live a free-er life in the land of opportunity. To make sure that I fit-in in school, my parents adopted English and the values of an American lifestyle. If you ask anyone who knows my parents, you'd soon learn that they weren't like the "stereotypical" Asian parents. We spoke English at home; went to a diverse school; and assimilated the American culture. But even so, as I grew up, I couldn't shake the troubling thought that my parents had to leave their home country to a completely foreign home - and that's not even the half of it. As an adult, I sometimes have the recurring fear that that experience of war had affected their psychology and thereby transferring that psychology on to me. I feel pretty normal; but enough about me. The intention of this blog is not to talk about my background or the effects of war, instead, The Foreground is a space for me to take notice of the advances of society and sift the details that encompass a particular advancement to bring what may be overlooked in the background into the foreground.
The idea here is similar to an analogy of the human eye. Our optic system is structured in a way that our focal point of vision is only represented by a small portion of our eyeball - the fovea. This means everything else that we have not focused our vision on is out-of-focus and is visually pieced together by our brain. The intention of The Foreground is to examine and re-examine the details surrounding a focal point and present the benefits of alternative ideas. The propositions that I make in this blog may challenge cherished systems and practices, but the intention is not to catastrophize. The end goal here is to promote alternative thinking, generate meaningful conversation and debate, and presume a future where our problems will be resolved.
The topics of this blog will primarily delve into discussions on the incumbencies of society, culture, economy, psychology, politics, technology, science and the environment. I say this all with a little smothering of cheese: each essay will have the intention to benefit our well-being as humans of this world we call Earth - or at the very least, a benefit to you as food for thought - again pun intended. With your input, we hold the conversations that will shape a global economy - an economy of language and an economy of valuation. Just think of it this way, we hold the stakes every day to create a renewed and greater society. So let's begin this journey together and let our visions come into the foreground.
