Lifestyle voting

There was an interesting piece in the Toronto Star the other day by provincial affairs columnist Martin Regg Cohn. Cohn was taking to task Ontario’s Chief Electoral Officer for the limited scope of his proposed solution to persistently low voter turnouts—below 50 per cent in the last Ontario election.

The solution proposed by the CEO is to move voting day to Sunday, when people will theoretically have more time to get out and vote. Cohn calls for the CEO to “get with the times.” Just as people no longer expect to have to line up at a bank to have their passbook updated, he says, no one wants to line up to vote. The answer, in his view, is online voting. “I can’t think of a better way to engage young people, and busy people and distracted people, short of making voting mandatory.” I beg to differ, on two grounds. First of all, I kind of like the civic commitment entailed in the act of going out to vote, marking a ballot, and placing it in a box. It seems to me that young, busy or distracted people are either engaged in civics or they are not. Even to register and be verified as a voter by computer still requires you to lift a finger or two on your own initiative, so I wonder how much difference making it easier for them would really make. And second, if Mr. Cohn is serious about online voting, I wonder if it is he who should “get with the times.” More particularly, is he not cutting off a host of possibilities by his dismissive phrase “short of making voting mandatory”?

Let me suggest that the power of the computer can be harnessed in such a way that what he calls pejoratively “mandatory” voting can be seen in a much more positive light.

Not long before Christmas, I wrote a column about the making and marketing of expensive watches with gimmicks so arcane no human being could possibly take advantage of them, except to the extent he or she owned one and could lord that fact over his or her peers. For a day or two afterward, I was puzzled by the coincidence that my web brower had begun displaying all kinds of advertisements for expensive wristwatches. Then the penny dropped: Google had been watching my online preferences and was serving up advertisements that it thought I would bite on.

The point is this. Why not make it even easier for people to use the computer to vote? Why not run a program that pops up a ‘suggested vote based on web browsing history’? So if you’ve visited Conservative websites more often than Liberal or NDP ones, the program would tell you that your ballot is going to be earmarked Conservative unless you override it within a specified period.

Of course, the program would have to be a pretty reliable predictor. Frequency of visits to a party website is an easy one. What if you like to watch old episodes of The Flintstones on YouTube? Does that make you a sentimental New Democrat? If you donate to the Red Cross, does that automatically make you a bleeding heart Liberal? If you live in the K0K 3L0 postal code area, does that imply you’re a ‘to hell with intrusive government, I’m for Todd Smith and the Conservatives’ kind of person?

Rhetorical questions nothwithstanding, I have no doubt that the information mining process used by Google and other web search firms is infintely more sophisticated than I imagine. After all, it has been recording my wanderings for the past several years. It probably knows my preferences, peccadilloes and aversions better than I do.

For the past couple of years, CBC news has been using a program called Vote Compass as a tool to help voters connect with the right political party to suit their preferences. It’s being used in the current British Columbia election. I tried out the program. I had to answer about 15 questions about my stand on environmental issues, health care, immigration, native rights and so forth; with the requirement being a multiple choice (strongly agree, agree, and so forth) response to current practices. In less than 10 minutes, I was told where I fit on grid, the vertical axis being social liberalism or social conservativism; the horizontal axis being the environmental left or environmental right. I can see where I am plotted vis-à-vis the various parties; and I am told the extent, in percentages, to which I am aligned with the various party positions.

So if CBC news can just ask me a few questions and come up with so precise a response for me, I find it hard to believe that my answers to the questions can’t already be divined based on my Internet preferences.
So, Mr. Cohn, why don’t we go the full Monty and have my vote automatically registered for me. Let’s call it “lifestyle voting.” In order to vote, I won’t have to do anything, knowing that my vote follows my online behaviour. And if I am an NDPer by habit but happen to like Justin Tousletop’s hair better than Thomas Mulcair’s, I would have to intervene to adjust the computer’s determination to vote NDP on my behalf. Unless I wanted the computer to stop me from my own irrational inconsistency and my vote was locked in by my pledge to vote consistently with my behaviour. Now, that would be civic engagement!

dsimmonds@wellingtontimes.ca