The other day, when discussing trolls and blogging, no admission was made of ever reading other blogs. The rule here has been that there is absolutely no need to read any diatribe that starts with the word “I.” You know without continuing that the writer has no interest in the reader. And if you are not interested in your reader, why should what you have to say be of interest?
That being said some collections of blogs allow you to read the first couple sentences of the listed blogs. Skimming these aggregated blogs, does allow you to dig deeper into those that pique your interest. That is how a blog came to our attention that discussed a new approach to voting. This is a subject of interest.
Posted Thursday, May 2 this year, it was entitled A Modest Proposal for Effective Electoral Reform. Written by someone from British Columbia, the writer does not use his name. Maybe he is embarrassed by his lack of editorial rigor but most blogs suffer from that problem. Regrettably, anonymous blogs are rarely of any interest.
What the blogger proposed was a very simple solution to the need for marking your ballot for the candidate known to all of us as “None of the above.” You must admit, everybody has a problem with that one. This gentleman’s solution is that we should be allowed to mark our ballot in the negative. This would at least be a method of indicating the candidate we would least like to see elected.
The writer seemed to believe that having this information recorded might have a salutary effect on the candidate with a large number of rejections. He did not explain why.
What might have a more practical result would be to have a positive vote removed from the count for every negative vote cast. Consider, for example, candidate ‘A’ with 100 votes is followed by candidate ‘B’ with 90 votes. If candidate ‘A’ had more than ten more negative votes than candidate ‘B,’ then candidate ‘B’ would be declared the winner. It might not seem fair to some people but at least you would have fewer people annoyed with the result!
This tends to serve as a reminder of the time an old friend stood up in front of a community audience and made an impassioned speech in support of having stupid candidates for public office. His point was that stupid people deserve representation just as much as the rest of us. Luckily, many of them stick to blogging.
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Copyright 2013 © Peter Lowry
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