Last Tuesday, I voted in the midterm elections. I did it by filling out an absentee ballot in front of a computer at the library. I thought many of my votes were well informed, but frankly, my votes for the less prominent positions were not very well informed at all (I briefly consulted a few web pages), and for some votes I didn't feel informed enough to make any decision at all. This state of affairs is just unacceptable for this country in this age.
Today I got an idea from this post by Scott Adams. Scott says he doesn't vote because he doesn't know enough to make an informed decision. In the future, he thinks there will be a website where people can go to get informed to a sufficient degree, and when that time comes, he looks forward to voting.
I would like to develop a website with a very specific goal. For each election ballot item, there should be a single dynamic page that gives people the info they need to make a decision. It should allow people to quickly pinpoint the differences between the candidates that are relevant to their values. I don't know what that will look like yet, and I will appreciate any ideas other people suggest.
The site should be informative, smart, and unbiased the same way that Wikipedia is -- by fairly presenting input from lots of users. Maybe each voter can enter what their values are, and then the page will be modified to point out differences in stances that similar voters thought were important. One idea for ballot proposition issues is to have polls whose results are weighted by voters' scores on a short knowledge test (basic facts about the propositions).
By the way, I made my first web application last year -- a proof of concept for a new type of social networking site. A demo of RelationCraft is currently online. But I hope my politics site, or a future idea, will be a more practical candidate for wide release.
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