Adrian

What NEED does this meet?

I want to allow voters in any election to ask questions of the candidates collectively as a “panel”. Essentially, it’s an online version of the BBC’s Question Time/Any Questions but without any limits on the number of questions, who can ask them and what they can ask about.

Each question will have its own page with the candidates’ answers below it. This page will be permanent (permalinked) and therefore will provide a persistent and structured record of what the candidates said during the election.

This can be used for any election, whether it’s for Leader of the Free World or the Hon. Sec. of the Nether Stowey Philately Society. It’d be useful for political elections, trades unions, student unions, school councils, small clubs and societies. While there would be the definitive hosted version on the central website, as an open source app it could be installed on anyone’s website, including in a members’ section of a membership site or behind a firewall, eg. on a school or organisation intranet where you wouldn’t want it to be public.

What is the APPROACH?

Each election is set up by anyone that chooses to do so (hereafter, the Election Administrator or EA). They’re responsible for filling in the details of the election (when, where to vote, who can vote) and inviting the candidates by email. No attempt is made to get definitive election/candidate info from anywhere. It’s down to the EA. Therefore, the site can be used by anyone and scales up nicely. A location/polling date search discourages people from setting up multiple instances for the same election, unaware that someone has already done it.

Each election gets its own permanent URL.

Anyone (but hopefully an eligible voter) can ask a question to the panel of candidates. There is no limit to the number of questions. Qs are tagged by the questioner (keywords/folksonomy) and there is a tag cloud so that voters can find questions on the subjects that interest them. While this puts more work on the questioners, it avoids the possible bias of the EA defining a set of categories. Once a question has been asked, it becomes visible on the Qs awaiting Answers page, to discourage people from asking similar Qs.

The candidates’ answers to questions are “sealed bids”. There is a time limit on each Q, after which all answers are revealed. Hopefully, this will encourage the cands to answer positively about their plans and intentions rather than attack their opponents or their opponents’ answers. There is no compulsion on cands to answer every Q, but their answer stats will be visible on their profile page and the candidate list page.

Cands can use minimal blogging features in their answers, such as inline links and blockquotes.

The EA and candidates must register with the site. The voters/questioners can ask without registering, but must verify their mobile phone number. This is more reliable than email addresses and it’s harder to have multiple ones. It also permits participation by that significant slice of society that has a mobile phone but not an email address. (Look it up!)

Each cand has a profile page with their contact info, photo, affiliation, answers to Qs and list of Qs that they didn’t answer (because they missed the deadline or declined to.)

Voters can subscribe to an election’s feed (Qs & As) by verified email or just grab its RSS feed.

Voters can find other elections by a postcode/radius search (in the UK) or view them on the ubiquitous Google Map. Optionally, they can also find elections that have ended (advanced search).

EAs can link up with the EAs of other elections to form a group of related elections. Eg. all the constituencies in a general election, the wards within a local authority, or the various officers of an organisation. All elections in a group must have the same voting date(s).

Qs are moderated by the cands, not the EA. If a majority of cands hit the Stupid Question button on the answering form, it gets transferred to the Stupid Questions page and is public for everyone to see, but no answers can be submitted. This prevents offensive and impertinent questions cluttering the real answers pages and filters spam, but without the possibility of EA bias. Stupid Questions are not counted towards the cands’ answering stats. Perhaps have a “three strikes and you’re out” system for blocking phone numbers of people that submit too many stupid questions, at least for a period of time. This would work site-wide, not per election.

When an election ends, the EA can post the results and this is sent out to the email/RSS feed. They should also post a link to an official webpage with the certified results.

There needs to be provision for cands that withdraw or are disqualified, possibly for multi-stage elections and combined tickets (eg. leader/deputy leader).

Provide a feature for null cands (none of the above, reopen nominations) in the cands’ list and election results.

Anyone can sign up for an email/text message voting reminder. No point talking about it unless you actually go and vote!

Optionally, it could have a calendar for meetings/hustings related to this election.

What are the BENEFITS to people?

For voters:

– get answers to specific questions
– find what the cands think on your favourite topics
– permanent record after the election has ended, so you can hold the winners accountable
– get a reminder to vote!
– find cand info in one place
– keep up to date on the campaign issues without it being filtered through news media or coming direct from the cands’ PR people

For candidates:

– answer the questions the voters are really asking, not the ones you’d like them to ask
– connect directly with the electorate
– answer more questions than you could at meetings (and in your own time)
– see clearly what the opposition is saying
– direct voters to your website

For society:

Hopefully it would restore some small amount of faith in democracy in the broadest sense by putting candidates and voters together in a way that respects the candidates’ time and the voters concerns, without the filtering and bias of news media and PR.

It must be emphasised that this could and should be used for any election, not just official or political ones.

What is the COMPETITION?

I’d love to hear about it if there’s anything suitable already available. A generic forum app really doesn’t cut it, as candidates don’t have all day to respond on long threads to dozens or hundreds of voters.

What BUDGETS & LOGISTICS are required?

It’s not difficult, just a conventional web app with no fancy graphics or user interface magic needed. It’s medium-sized and not complex in any way. Costing it would be the same as for any similar project, ie. if it’s for a client, estimate the time needed and double it; if it’s for yourself, estimate the time needed and halve it. 😉

The only bit that incurs extra expense on top of standard hosting costs is sending the text messages. You could have a donations page on each election where people could transfer an amount from Paypal. Donations would be pooled for the whole site. £5 is a lot of text messages at bulk rates.

If people are going to (optionally) set this up on their own servers, you probably want to write an abstraction layer for bulk SMS sending services so that people can choose one that suits them. Maybe one already exists. It’d be great as a standalone open-source library.