After the recent Ontario election, I wrote about the calls for election reform, in particular the problems with the First-Past-The-Post system choosing candidates that don't truly reflect the desires of the voters. Author Cory Doctorow has proposed an interesting idea for getting around these problems without changing any laws.
The idea is to get people to agree to vote for third-party candidates the same way they agree to fund things on Kickstarter. You sign up and agree to vote for the candidate, but only if a certain number of other voters also sign up. If that minimum number is reached, each of those voters gets an e-mail letting them know. Thus, they can vote for the candidate knowing that they have the amount of support that can make a difference. If the support level isn't reached, then the few people who have signed up will know that this candidate doesn't really have a chance, and voting for them would be throwing their vote away.
It sounds like it could work. Though there is quite an opportunity for fraud: you could have vote promises made by people from outside the district that's voting, or multiple one person signing-up several times. A fringe party could inflate their vote promises, thus making them look more popular. And even if you had some way of identifying people when they sign-in so that you could be sure that they are real people who live in the proper area, there's still a problem: one of the main parties could have their supporters promise to vote for a minor party at the other end of the political spectrum. For instance, Liberal supporters could claim to support the Christian Heritage Party, making them seem more popular than they are. That way, Conservatives would vote for the CHP, wrongly thinking they have the support to win.
But the bigger problem would be getting it big enough to provide voters with an accurate view of fringe party popularity. For one thing, your pool of potential users is people who both vote and keep up with the latest things on the Internet. I can't be bothered to draw out the Venn Diagram of that, but I think you can imagine that it's not the biggest group to draw your customers from. The other problem is just trying to explain what you're trying to do. A lot of people won't get it. Not you. You're smart; you read my blog. I even assumed that you know what a Venn Diagram is. Or know how to use Wikipedia.
In spite of the difficulties, I'd be willing to use one of these services. That is, of course, assuming that users' privacy and security are respected. As I observed before, our voting system isn't likely to change any time soon, so we need to look for alternatives.
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