[Waragainstsleep]

What if the electoral roll was reinvented as a social network except without the social aspect?

Everyone eligible to vote had a profile and when they log in, they are presented with any political votes or polls which are currently pending.

Whenever a vote was taken on a local or national level, everyone was allowed to vote online using this network. Here is where the idea gets interesting: What if votes could be weighted by expertise?

If you wished to vote on a certain issue, you could opt to answer a set of up to 10 questions in order to lend extra weight to your vote.
The questions would be set by recognised experts and would be required to have absolute, irrefutable answers so that left and right could not argue over what the answers were.

The questions would get harder as they went on. The first few would be easy enough to look up via a search engine, the later ones would require the voter to make a calculation or logical deduction of some kind (maybe with a time limit so they couldn't easily google the answers.)
Perhaps the earlier ones would be multiple choice but not the later ones.

The point would be to test the voters understanding of the subject on which they were voting. The more they know about the subject, the greater weight their vote is ultimately given. They can opt at any time to stop answering the questions and just vote with whatever weight they have already earned.

I am not looking for responses about practicality of implantation like security or ways the system could be abused, this is just a discussion of the concept. Thoughts?

[Thorzdad]

Originally Posted by Waragainstsleep 

Here is where the idea gets interesting: What if votes could be weighted by expertise?
If you wished to vote on a certain issue, you could opt to answer a set of up to 10 questions in order to lend extra weight to your vote.
The questions would be set by recognised experts and would be required to have absolute, irrefutable answers so that left and right could not argue over what the answers were.

Let's skip over the real-world issue of online access not being universal yet, with non-access rising as income levels diminish.

In the US, even recognizing who is/isn't an acceptable expert on an issue is subject to heated partisan debate. How would you determine a qualified panel for a subject like marriage equality, for instance? Or abortion? The reality is, there are no "irrefutable" answers to issues like these, unless you are a hard-line partisan. To work properly, it simply couldn't be a panel of extreme partisans, based on the hope that extremes will balance each other out.

Then, you have to deal with the thorny issue of majority rule often resulting in the "incorrect" rule, especially in cases of minority rights.

I would suspect that, quite quickly, political groups would be able to mine the questions and quickly distribute answers to their constituents, in order to skew the results in favor of their agendas.

[LegendaryPinkOx]

Not to mention the vulnerability of online accounts to hacking, misplaced passwords, etcetera.

[Chongo]

Democracy has often been described as organized chaos. (Five wolves and two rabbits voting on what to eat)
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[Waragainstsleep]

I was aware of the potential hacks and workarounds, I'm more interested in the concept. The panel could be made up the 3 members of each party with the most relevant qualifications to the subject at hand, or perhaps they could be appointed by those people. I'm sure there are ways to make it reasonably fair. The questions would be designed to test that someone had looked into the subject and understood what they had read on it.

Disseminating the easier questions and answers won;don't matter so much as it would still demonstrate that the voter had taken the trouble to read up a bit or at least take a genuine interest.