ExpertDabbler

Trust me, its not a good feeling to know that the candidate I voted for today is unlikely to get his deposit back. At the same time, I don’t want to be like one who votes for the ‘jeyikara katchi’. That’s dumb. The guy will lose deposit not because he’s bad but there are lot of other factors that influences the voter’s mind even without ‘500Rs + biriyani’ syndrome.

First, the voter slip was given by a leading political party at my place. The election officers insist on this slip to make their job easier. I did not carry it to the polling booth first but my mom was turned away because of this. I had to fetch it later.
As far as I know, only three parties were giving out this slip.

My mom who is obviously in her mid-fifties and not academically educated did not vote for the candidate we discussed yesterday. The reason was simple - she could not recall the guy’s symbol! It was hard for her to look out for a particular candidate among 43 candidates. So she instinctively chose the one from the top three in the list because she had to choose one, which incidentally is the party who gave the voter slip in our residence!

It kinda sucks to have 43 candidates contesting a single seat. I liked at least three of them but I could choose only one. I am sure none of the three will get their deposits back. One among the crooks will probably get through due to something similar to ‘brand recall’ (if my mom is any example) and we callously use this method to elect a representative to run a country with so many issues and complexities. We take pride in this system when we should be looking at ways to improve this.

So is there a better way? Apparently, that’s an interesting question.

Check out this Poundstone’s interview. He talks lot of greek and latin which i’d never understand - range voting, IVR, spoiler(Vijaykanth) effect blah blah. But the key takeway was something I knew all along - hotornot.com works well:)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 13th, 2009 at 1:31 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.