Amotional Voting
By: John Kuhn
Tags: Elections, Voting, Bias, Emotions

This is a quick thought experiment in applying a debiasing tactic employed by english teachers to presidential elections.

If you’ve ever taken a psychology class or read one of David Kahneman’s books, you’ll probably notice an overwhelming constant through all studies and situations. Humans are very illogical emotional creatures who often take shortcuts in decision making and as a result make frequent bad decisions.

There’s a lot of studies showing grading bias in English teachers, although no fault to them in specific [source]. This particular study describes the halo bias teachers are susceptible to once they see a student perform well or poorly in a past assignment. The essay currently being graded reaps the rewards or detriments of the past work’s evaluation. Said another way, if an English teacher deems you to be a good student, they’re less likely to grade your papers harshly.

But this is a problem, and students have bad days all the time. Should it be fair that a student who had a bad first week of class, or a student who started at a level lower than their peers continue to be under the gun because a teacher has judged the student as below average on a first impression? Of course not, and one simple effective solution is blind grading. Just ask your students to turn in their work without their name, or have a computer program assign a random number to each student.

Let’s talk about voting

Politics continues to be an ever increasingly emotional battle. It’s most unfortunate as emotional decisions are almost always bad decisions, but politicians rightly know that an emotional appeal is far more powerful than any logical appeal hopes to be. No one gets off the couch to vote for a fiscally responsible administration but they would go vote for an administration vowing to not give any more equity to China. Although effective, emotion is increasingly leading to our divided politic. Further, emotional appeals lead to uninformed voters and our government suffers as a result.

Imagine a world where we picked our representatives without knowing their names, what they looked like, or past experiences. While this may sound off putting, I argue such a blind voting process like the blind grading process English teachers are soliciting would be a much more efficient and sustainable voting process.

Suspending any sort of energy in the implementation of the idea, let’s first just imagine the benefits. For one, there are absolutely no party affiliations and our rigid two party system is challenged. Something like 78–80 percent of people vote straight ticket [source]. These voters are not informed, they are swept up by rhetoric and at no fault to them.

Further, imagine the efficiency gained by eliminating any and all campaigning. This last presidential election saw campaigns who spent $14 billion [source]. This probably includes at least a billion dollars in tv ads. Imagine a world where that money were spent on new roads, bridges, and parks or at the very least saved, because after all assuming both campaigns spent a similar amount $7 billion went for absolutely noting.

Lastly but certainly not limited to, identity politics go completely out the window. It would be impossible to vote for a person based on their race, gender, or identity within some elevated group because you’re never voting for an individual.

Bottom line, it’s hard to be an informed voter who makes voting decisions purely from a policy perspective with so many emotional appeals in front of us. Can a form of blind voting encourage a more logical voting populace and cut out the fat from our current system?