About 15 months ago, I wrote a short blog entry on How PeopleCount Works. Please read that first. It summarizes what our political system would look like with people using PeopleCount.org. For this entry, imagine we had that system.
If you vote on PeopleCount.org today, you’ll see you can say whether or not you’d like an approval vote on the candidates, to see who the front-runners are. An “approval vote” is one where you can vote for all the candidates you’d be happy to see win.
But what would an approval vote look like? What could it tell us? On the site, we’ll be able to have such a vote and see. Maybe we’ll find a third-party candidate who’s center-of-the-road, dedicated, free of corporate money and most people like! Where today’s polls only ask which single candidate you’d vote for if the election were tomorrow, we can much more thoroughly explore public opinion on PeopleCount.org.
On PeopleCount.org, we could even run some approval votes in different categories. A candidate weak in one area, such as foreign policy, could focus his message on that, or tell us how he’ll compensate. A candidate known for accomplishments in just a few areas could tell us her less-known experiences.
Seeing what others like and dislike about someone can open our eyes. By seeing each others votes, we’ll be having a kind of national conversation. And we can respond by changing our votes if we like. Or maybe we discover most of us like an independent who has a history of suggesting compromises and promises to represent the people instead of a party.
If this happens, probably the major-party candidates will stop promising to represent a party and promise to represent all of our interests as well!
While PeopleCount.org will focus on issues, it’ll also enable us to learn much more about voting systems, and much more about candidates. PeopleCount.org is about much, much more than “voting on issues.” It’s about the American people being free to communicate constructively, lifting the limits on what’s possible.
Part 3 will show how, with PeopleCount.org, we will naturally act responsibly to guide government.