A ‘weighted’ democracy: What if votes were … unequally important?
Imagine a high-tech election process where a weight factor is assigned to the vote (not the citizen) via a process aiming to reflect the level of ‘context understanding’ of the citizen at ‘voting time’. The higher the level of context understanding —that is, the reality — by the citizen, the higher the importance of the vote.
The level of ‘context understanding’ could be objectively determined via a secure, randomized digital micro-questionnaire to be answered by the citizen as part of the (online) voting process.
Such a voting process would effectively reduce the importance of emotion-driven voting behaviors and the impact of stereotypes, tradition or other non-rational components. As a result, votes (not citizens) who are objectively found to be more connected to our (complex) reality will get increased importance impacting the overall result leading to more rational results.
This also sends a clear message and provides additional motivation to citizens: in order to increase the importance of your vote, read, discuss, understand your socioeconomic environment. Social status, educational level, profession and any form of class, are all indifferent since the process is anonymous, agnostic of any metadata of the voter and it is only based on answering the randomized, secured online micro-questionnaire.
As an example, consider a referendum asking citizens to vote with a Yes or No on a simply stated but complex enough matter such as the Brexit or the acceptance of the additional Greek austerity package. Should all votes have the same importance? Should a vote from a citizen with limited or no understanding of the wider socio-economic environment, strategic aspects and the basics of the European Union and the single market have the same importance with a vote from a proven subject matter expert on these aspects?
It’s not about right or wrong; it is about how deep is one’s understanding of the reality/ socioeconomic context (at a particular point in time): two individuals with totally different opinions on a particular topic could have the same weight factor if they both understand reality at the same level. All done securely, anonymously via AI leveraging vast amounts of knowledge from the public domain.
Furthermore if we realize the fact that a significant subset of the population is indeed manipulated by the media and the political parties, at least at some extent, the obvious question is how to reduce the effect of this manipulation (mid-term) and finally eliminate this problem by motivating people to actively participate in politics — with the general sense — understand the reality and vote with judgement and knowledge instead of emotion, stereotypes and impulse (long-term).
