All posts by Mark

two (three?) curiosities

Generally I don’t want to get too political here, but these are party-agnostic:

1. Why do we let companies essentially put political figures in their debt? Money wins elections, a major source of cash is from companies, and companies want some kind of return on investment. This makes no sense and we voters have no one to blame but ourselves.
Personally I would be fine with a % of my taxes paying for a way for the candidates to be heard, although not so much if they spend it on smear campaigns. Though, even if they did, at least they wouldn’t owe favors.

2. Why don’t more states use mail in voting? It’s resistant to fraud, it allows me time to think and weigh my choices, not to mention I don’t have to spend a day (or any time) waiting in line. I have this general notion that only the people who care about the issues would remember to send it in (I may be full of crap on this.)

I’ve also wondered if we could vote by issue-weight-candidate, i.e. have a top 40 issue list picked by an independent group using a fully transparent process, then vote on each issue and weigh it accordingly. This would constitute part of your vote (I don’t know, 40-60%), another part would be on subjective merits such as crisis handling or even, well, just how much you like the candidate. I believe in the last part because in the nearest primaries I used one of those issue & weight surveys, and my 2nd choice came out first by 1%, yet I far preferred my first choice based on my prior research. Although it would be a real bear to balance the percentages well, the goal of having candidates win who reflect the public’s actual will is highly appealing.

Links

In this category I’ll share the various links I come across which might be cool or interesting.  If you frequent social news aggregation sites this might be mostly repeats, otherwise you’ll wonder how I came across all this.  :]