We want to revolutionise the way people think about elections

The Voting Project will be a groundbreaking digital election, to be run in parallel to the 2015 UK general election.

The entire system will be based on policies and ideas, not parties or politicians. Participants will debate policy ideas, vote on policy ideas and the results will be expressed exclusively in terms of policy ideas, without reference to political parties at any stage in the process. We want to challenge people to focus on substance, to think differently about the way we vote and to show what an election result could look like if people voted on policies alone.

What’s wrong with the system we have now?

We don’t believe our electoral system allows voters to express clearly enough what they think about ideas. Unless participating in a referendum, voters are not directly asked to indicate their views on policies. Choosing between constituency candidates may be an effective way to constitute a Parliament but it usually fails to make clear what the electorate actually want that Parliament to do. Even if a voter is aware of a candidate’s policies, they may not agree with them on every issue. We know that people can care about ideas, and would express their views if given a realistic mechanism to do so. In September, for example, we saw over 84% of the electorate in Scotland vote on the issue of independence — a massive turnout to vote about an idea.

The tenuous link between votes and policies: Newly-formed governments often claim that their legislative programmes have the backing of the electorate. This is very difficult to prove. The party that formed the government in 2005 won only 35.2% of the vote. But only 61.4% of the electorate actually voted. Therefore fewer than a quarter of the electorate chose for that party to be in power. Those who did vote for them may have done so for all sorts of oblique reasons. It can be virtually impossible to determine what laws people wanted to see enacted.

How can a government really claim that its legislative programme represents the will of the people? The negotiation of a coalition government in 2010 saw attention shift, for a time, to the negotiation of policy ideas, but coalitions are rare in the UK and this was the exception rather than the rule.

There’s too much noise to hear ourselves think: We began thinking about The Voting Project during the 2014 European election campaign. We found it depressing that there had been so little discussion of substance and what the European Parliament would actually do. Most people didn’t seem to know or care about what the Parliament’s legislative programme might be. The focus was almost entirely on a poisonous polarised debate about the single issue of whether or not the UK should think about leaving the EU and whether people preferred Nigel Farage to Nick Clegg. Similarly, the 2011 referendum on our electoral system was dominated by animosity towards personalities and the subject matter of the arguments seemed to be drowned out in the noise.

People are generally more engaged during general elections, but the problems are similar. There is plenty of discussion of policies, but the subtle sounds of ideas are often drowned out by the crashing din of noisy party politics. Voters don’t often get to hear about the full range of possibilities that exist within a policy spectrum and debates are frequently side-tracked by over-simplification and animosity towards personalities. Some issues are highlighted to the public entirely according to the priorities of parties or the media. Voters can arrive at the polling booth with all sorts of factors in their minds distracting them from thinking about substance.

We want to see what a system would look like if those noisy distractions are taken away.

What we will do and how we will do it

We want to challenge this traditional way of operating elections. We’ve already started building a prototype for an online voting platform, designed to operate a policy-based election. With Kickstarter’s help, we will launch our platform at the time of the 2015 general election campaign. Participants will vote on ideas, and not just the narrow field of polarised ideas often dictated by political parties and the media. Voters will consider policies, the results will be captured and visualised, with national data being updated as the election progresses. Data and trends can then be used as part of a national debate.

We will work with researchers and the public themselves to craft and crowdsource a spectrum of policy ideas, to then be put to the vote. These will be ideas generated by the people, voted on by the people. We won’t simply draw them from party political manifestos, aiming instead to make the process as directly democratic as possible. We will work with designers and artists to find novel and interesting ways of visualising both individual and national voting data, to make the election as engaging and exciting as possible and to really capture the imagination.

What we will achieve

The Voting Project will achieve three things:

• Voters will be encouraged to be engaged with and well-informed about policy ideas and to challenge to question the way we approach elections in this country.
• Every voter will receive a personal, visual representation of their political beliefs as an interactive infographic. This will help people visualise their beliefs, without simply distilling down into crass party political colours.
• The platform will produce a real-time digital map of national policy beliefs, allowing everyone to see what, at any given time, the country as a whole thinks of specific policy ideas. At the time the next government is formed, we will compare their emerging legislative programme with our outcomes, seeing how far the programme of government matches with that developed by the people themselves.

The stages of The Voting Project campaign

We will operate our campaign in the following stages:

• Research, design and development. (December–February) Researching the policy spectrum, the design of the digital system and the visualisation of results. We will engage with the public as soon as possible to begin building a policy spectrum. We’re particularly keen for our backers to be involved, to help us build the system and to spread the word. We’ll also plan our publicity for the election itself. We’ll keep our backers updated about how we’re getting on and where possible will involve them in contributing to and testing the emerging system.
• Publicity and implementation: (March–April) When the system has been designed and developed and tested, we’ll then shift the focus to publicity and implementation. We want the system to really engage people and to be striking, thought-provoking and beautiful. We’d like some striking artwork to use in our publicity and will seek the widest possible coverage. There will continue to be opportunities for our backers to be involved.
• Delivery and review: (April–May) At the time of the general election campaign we will formally open the polls. Voters will be able to register and vote and we will analyse and publicise the results as they develop. Close to the election itself we will capture a snapshot of the nation’s policy views and use this as a point of comparison with the new government’s emerging legislative programme. We’ll also see what has been learned from this process and consider how The Voting Project might be able to have a positive impact in the future.

How The Voting Project will be different

We’re not the first people to come up with the idea of an online election in which people vote for policies. Other systems, such as Vote For Policies and Votematch offer anonymised policy choices, drawn from party manifestos, and then tell you which party or parties you are most aligned with. This is important in helping people be better informed when casting their vote in the general election. We are not seeking to mimic this work. Our approach is different. The Voting Project will be an election in its own right with a very different outcome. We won’t be guiding people back into the established system, telling them which party they are most aligned with. This process will begin and end with ideas. We want to challenge people to think “why not think differently about the whole system?”

What help we need and why

We’re seeking to raise £20,000 to launch The Voting Project. This will be used to fund the research, design, development, hosting and publicity campaign of the project. The more funds we are able to raise, the more lively, interesting and well-publicised we will be able to make the project. We’ve already carried out a lot of the ground-work but require funds to assist in delivering a campaign that is as high quality, ambitious and robust as possible.

Some guiding principles

• The Voting Project will be lively, provocative and engaging, challenging people to think differently.
• The Voting Project will not feature parties or politicians, just policies and ideas.
• The Voting Project will be realistic about its scope. It won’t claim to be a workable replacement for the current electoral system, but will demonstrate a different approach.
• The Voting Project will invite participation from backers and the public wherever possible.
• The Voting Project will be approached from the perspective of informed ordinary people, not political experts. The policy results may not be perfect, but that’s democracy!

We’re very excited about The Voting Project. We hope you will be too. Help us revolutionise the way we all think about elections.

Pledge to support the The Voting Project on Kickstarter