Potential Advisors

Eric Armstrong 29 Jul 2017 Motivation

These potential advisors are people and organizations you could be hearing from at election time, with important information on elections big and small.

Note:
This list was originally part of the article explaining why and how a voting advice system will be rapidly adopted.

Contents

Expanded Influence of Trusted Advisors

It is worth noting that the lists below are limited to widely-known potential advisors. But the very fact that they are widely known makes it difficult for them to give targeted advice on smaller ballot items like (say) City Council in Kansas. Because they are widely known, their outreach is national, and even international. If they use their mass-media access to make a recommendation in a small race, virtually all of their followers will have no interest in it, which will tend to reduce the number of followers they have!

So one of the major benefits of a voting advice is the fact that it will allow well-known figures to pass on highly-target recommendations, without fear of a reducing their appeal. The increased outreach will certainly expand their influence. But an even greater potential benefit for society is the ability to put new potential advisors on the map, and expand their reach.

Some thoughtful person or organization could right down the block from you, right now? Or maybe a few streets over, or slightly farther away. They might have really useful advice to share! But how will you find each other?

The voting advice system makes it possible. If you trust well-know advisors A, B, C, and someone else does too, then there is a strong overlap in advisors you both trust. If the other person also trusts local advisor X, then the system knows enough to recommend X as a potential advisor. Or perhaps that other person is potential advisor X. Either way, you get a trusted advisor for local ballot items you didn’t have before.

And as their number of followers grows, so does their influence — which means when person Y comes along with a good idea, they want to convince advisor X of the value of that idea. In that situation, person X becomes a “key” to unlocking the vote, which gives them a certain amount of power.

(Of course, as a source of voting advice, there will be the inevitable attempt to sway their opinion with gifts and bribes. But if they succumb, it will weaken the level of trust they enjoy. In fact, it could become immediately apparent that they have been swayed when their advice suddenly falls outside the norm of other trusted advice.)