Voting based on “The Wisdom of the Crowds”
Following the recent midterm elections, I thought it would be fitting to analyze a small part of the voting system regarding network behavior, specifically ‘The Wisdom of the Crowds’ effect on selecting the best candidate. I have linked 2 articles here, the first one from realclearscience.com is a more technical article on why our current elections do not fall under a pure wisdom-of-the-crowd scenario, and my second article is a local news article from my hometown about the same topic, just significantly less formal.
In the first article, Ross Pomeroy starts by explaining what this exciting phenomenon is, where it originated, and why it is so powerful in finding a better answer than individual behavior could. Theoretically, during an election between 2+ candidates, the majority of votes within a group leads to the best candidate. That is the theory behind democracy itself and it SHOULD work. Unfortunately, our society is more complicated than that, this behavior is stifled by social influencers, news sources, your family, neighbors, friends. For the Wisdom of the crowds phenomenon to work, there are 4 criteria, explains Pomeroy. There must be diversity of opinion (which is protected by our first amendment, though sometimes lacks if people are afraid of holding certain views in their circles), Independence (Does not happen under our system, this is stopped as soon as one person shares their views with another which happens daily), Decentralization (which happens for the most part. Slightly hindered in an age of national media and internet, but still mostly fits), and Aggregation (which is the only one of the 4 requirements that actually happens in the purest sense). So the American voting system does mostly well, there is just one huge problem INDEPENDENCE OF THOUGHT. It is nearly impossible to stop yourself from hearing any political opinions, be it from television, internet ads, news articles, other people! It is hard enough to stop one person from having their own vote independent from any outside thought, but protecting the whole nation would be impossible! The influence isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it can help inform some voters of policy issues, relevant events, etc… but it only really matters if the influencing sources are “right” 100% of the time, and that will also never happen ever.
All this being said, it might seem advantageous as a society to facilitate bringing back independent voting, which is what Bob Blubaugh covers in his article on the same topic. He compares asking another person about who they should vote for to his father giving advice on current hip-hop music. He brings up an interesting point, we have trivialized asking other people for information. We ask complete strangers where we should eat, what car we should buy, who should watch our kids, but maybe we should refrain from asking strangers who we should vote for. Voting is one of the most important functions we have as citizens, and using the Wisdom of the Crowds strategy to decide the people who are running our country is a valid tactic, we just need to make sure we stick to it in a more pure sense.
https://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2012/11/do-elections-represent-true-wisdom-of-the-crowd.html
https://www.carrollcountytimes.com/columnists/cc-op-blubaugh-111118-story.html