Obscured Voting

There is often too much emphasis on the PEOPLE in the process, their age, gender, race, family, friends, etc and not enough emphasis on what that person actually will DO when they get into office. I propose a radical change to the voting system as it stands now. Not only would it change the voting system, but the entire process of campaining.

You walk to your polling place and sign in. You then enter a booth and begin the voting process.

Instead of a list of names you see a series of questions about important issues.

Before you begin you are asked to rate the issues in order of preference. If you feel education is more important than economy, for example, education questions will weigh more in the final decision if you are split down the middle.

If it is still a completely dead heat in the end you're shown your pluses and minuses for each side (still obscured) and asked if any one side appeals to you more than the other. (For example, I'd really rather see a candidate for "this" and "this" win and I can let go of "that" so I'll go with candidate A)

All the questions will be based on answers to public debates given by the candidates. Obviously, you could sit through the debates and "Game" the system to vote for whomever you wanted without obscurity by listening to them but I don't think that is a flaw, if someone is listening to the "cute" candidate and hear them say too many things they disagree with maybe they change their minds. Regardless, at least they're paying attention to what the people are saying about the issues.

When you get to the end of the questions you are issued a voting receipt with a record of every question and answer given and finally you see for whom you voted. The receipt you were given is a duplicate, the original is kept safe within the machine for auditing. In the event of a recount in your county you could be asked to return with your receipt to verify your vote on the official records via a non-identifing number on your receipt.

This also dismisses the two-party system. You could, in theory, have any number of candidates running and the questions could apply to several of the candidates. Only the one you most closely relate to will be your vote.

You could even use some other voting system entirely. The one that comes to mind would rank your preferences and assign a value to each candidate. The candidate with the highest point value from your area would win.