[MarkG509]

Perhaps it time someone built a web site where the opinions, comments, and especially actions/votes, of every politician running for office, from City Council on up, were tracked.

Scoring the politicians based on their support for the constitution and especially human rights, plus encouraging the vote, could fix this after just an election cycle or two.

[Johnie]

How about try to increase voter turnout first? No amount of public education and politician tracking will be useful if only 1/3 of eligible voters actually vote.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2014/11...

[vezzy-fnord]

Low turnout is an acceptable response to an inefficient system where majoritarianism, gerrymandered districts, ballot access laws, etc. culminate in a meticulous engineering of the odds being stacked against the voters.

Though, for some reason, voting and "democracy" elicit such warm conditioned feelings that people are willing to desperately scrape for examples of whatever small local victories they've secured in order to justify that it's worth going through the whole jungle. Electoral reform, though? Dead end.

[aggie]

In my mind the issue is not absolute turnout but representative turnout. If only 1% of people voted but they were a good representation of the varied interests of the population, that would be just fine.

The problem today is that certain groups (poor, young, ethnic minorities) are less likely to vote and thus have less of a voice as a group. There are systematic changes that could be made to encourage more representative voting, such as easier voter registration practices and a national voting holiday. Australia even imposes a small fine for not voting, which surely would not sit well with many in America but would probably be a good thing for our republic.

[rhizome]

These things are not so separate as you portray, voter turnout can increase when people learn the people governing them are total dipshits and bullies. There are a lot of motivating reasons, and people are different.

[eru]

> Scoring the politicians based on their support for the constitution and especially human rights, plus encouraging the vote, could fix this after just an election cycle or two.

If people cared about this.

[jkestner]

Close to this is who's paying for their opinion, and there's a browser plug-in for that: http://allaregreen.us

Plug-ins are nice for us concerned techno-citizens, but most people don't care and it won't change things directly that fast. I think the media needs to do its job of informing us rather than entertaining us, and schools need to train vigilant citizens rather than compliant ones.

[morgante]

That's actually part of the vision for http://cafe.com, launching this fall.