Photograph by Scott Olson/Getty

MINNEAPOLIS (The Borowitz Report)—With U.S. Presidential elections now costing more than five billion dollars, there must be a cheaper way to find the worst people in the country, experts believe.

According to Davis Logsdon, a political scientist at the University of Minnesota, the United States could use current technology to find the nation’s most reprehensible people at a fraction of the five-billion-dollar price tag.

“Any search for the worst people in the country should logically begin one place: on Twitter,” said Logsdon, who recommends scouring the social network for users who consistently show signs of narcissistic-personality disorder, poor impulse control, and other traits common to odious people.

Once a comprehensive list of those Twitter users is compiled, Logsdon said, it could be cross-referenced with a database containing the names of people who have presided over spectacular business failures, have been the target of multiple ethics probes, or are currently under indictment for a broad array of criminal offenses.

“After we crunch the numbers and find the twelve or so worst people in our database, we could then put them on television to demonstrate just how awful they are as people,” said Logsdon, who noted that that part of the current system “works very well.”

All in all, Logsdon believes that his method for finding the nation’s worst people would cost practically nothing, leaving five billion dollars left over to help rebuild the nation’s schools, roads, and other crumbling infrastructure.

The political scientist expects to encounter significant resistance to his proposal, however. “It’s hard to imagine a new system finding worse people than our current one does,” he admitted.