Voting

[andrewducker]

I have no objection to people voting the wrong way _deliberately_.  I have friends who will vote Conservative, and if they have thought about the issues and believe that this is the best thing to do, then that is what they _should_ do.

I object to people voting without knowledge or understanding.  I'd happily have a (very simple) quiz before the election.  One that asked people to identify the leaders of the main  parties, and identify a couple of policies of each.  One that could be passed by anyone who spent five minutes reading up on things before the vote.  Because then at least people would have had to spend 5 minutes taking an interest before they voted. 

They might even learn something.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Gods yes. I've been advocating the same thing for a while. I'm fairly certain several US presidential elections in the past 25 years would have had radically different results if there was even an exceedingly simple quiz about various candidates and issues. You could even have a quiz on each issue or separate political race, and you could vote on all of those that you passed. Ignorance and democracy make a very poor mix. Of course, these days, my ideal form of government looks far more like Iain M. Banks' Culture than like democracy.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

The Independant had a fairly useful front page quiz of sorts yesterday with the three main parties and the various issues. You rate 1-5 how much you agree with each parties take on things, add them up at the end and there you go.

Dumbed down certainly, but worthwhile.

[akicif.livejournal.com]

Would've needed an extra three columns here for Green, Scot Nat and SSP, though.

[laserboy.livejournal.com]

Ideally we'd have that, yeah. It was nice that there was at least -something- for lazy sorts who hadn't bothered to read the manifestos.

[andrewducker]

There are no Green or Scottish Socialist MPs, nor much chance of any, as far as I know.

The SNP do, admittedly have 5. But on a UK level they aren't going to influence policy.