Can you imagine being shown an iPad in 2001, when George W. Bush was sort of elected to be the president of the U.S of A? The Nokia 8250 couldn’t even take pictures. In 2001, an iPad would look like stolen alien technology. Yet here we are using our 11th generation iPads to figure out which Harry Potter House Facebook thinks we would best be suited for while we’re still basically using a hole punch and geriatric volunteers (who affectionately refer to the whole punch as “the sorting stapler”) to vote for elected officials. Why? If we can engineer an algorithm that will use the aggregated data from your choosing to ‘like’ the music of Dave Matthews, your support for Manchester United, and 68 other variables and predict your preference on a nearly everything else better than the person that sleeps (slept) 6 feet away from you in a cramped apartment maybe that algorithm can do more than just suggest shit for Amazon to try to sell us.

What if candidates were given 5,000 question surveys to fill out while eligible voters were given 500 question surveys? These surveys would be fed into an algorithm that would then select the candidate that most aligns with each citizens values. This data set is well above a reasonable threshold for confident selection given the aforementioned Cambridge study. The algorithm would need to inform you of who it selected as your choice and we could even consider an option for voters to override the algorithms selection inputing their own pre-determined selection instead but in my stupid little world, I say let the algorithm decide!

Of course there are a lot of problems to work out but they aren’t so different than the problems our current system face. This wouldn’t help the electoral college issue that allows candidates to win the presidency without winning the popular vote. That cog of the system should be retired immediately! Hacking is maybe the most obvious problem but I would argue it’s much harder to hack a rigid and complex set of computer code than the human mind. A friend might tell you they purchased a black Volvo automobile and you might start seeing a lot of black Volvo automobiles. This doesn’t mean there are an abnormal amount of black Volvo’s on the road it just means this is the first time you’ve paid attention to this specific data input i.e confirmation bias. In a way, your Volvo sporting friend hacked your brain! The algorithms don’t care about fake news and they aren’t influenced by drunken conversations with your uncle. To the statisticians out there: they can only respond to signals and don’t receive noise.

Additionally we should consider making voting mandatory. We could enact this by making employers extend a paid day out of office to vote (which we already mostly do) and issuing voters a tax form confirming they voted. This form would be filed with their taxes to prevent them from incurring a small penalty on their taxes much like this Nation already does with health care. Mandatory voting means more voices heard, more citizens actively engaged, and a larger data set which may result in the ideal candidate.

Listen, voter fraud and voter suppression are still a very real problem just as they are in our current system. Engineering the algorithm and the tech to support it would take a lot of work and oversight that would be difficult to manage. We would have to be incredibly mindful of building the system around transparency in how selections are computed and tallied. I don’t think this would be easy! But what we have is failing us. It’s an old system. It’s archaic. Sure, it’s uncomfortable to say that a computer algorithm is better suited at picking a candidate for us than we are but when you consider the amount of noise, money, time, and deception involved in political campaigns, doesn’t it just start to seem…practical!





Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to see what Netflix recommends for me to watch now that I’ve finished all of Schitt’s Creek.



