Who am I voting for?

Someone asked me who are you voting for?

I honestly confessed — I haven’t decided yet.

And this person was stunned — surprised. You haven’t decided yet? Isn’t it obvious?

Then he went on to make the argument for his party (doesn’t matter which) armed with highly inaccurate facts and conjectures making arguments laden with logical fallacies and cognitive biases (in plain words : DUMB and WRONG arguments)

So his assumption was that I did not know enough and hence I hadn’t decided (and hence the educational pitch) — while nothing can be farther from truth. I have been reading across views, and it is not tough to make a pro-(any party) argument.

But that is not the point.

To me, truly informed voting requires two important pieces of information: one, who you are / what you stand for and two, externally which party represents that the best.

I think many ‘informed’ people have no clue about either.

They have masked their fears, insecurities or greed as ‘reason’. Or they have packaged their idealism and projected it as the panacea to all issues.

And as for information — If you make up your mind and then go to seek information to support your decision, you will find adequate ‘data’ to support your choice. You would have found enough data even for the other choice.

So all of this is making me think that it is democracy itself that needs a rethink.

It seems to be the best ‘technology’ we have for now to represent what we collectively want — but it is highly flawed.

Because, it divides us more than uniting us. It brings out the most aggressive, adamant and disrespectful sides of us. It necessarily needs us to reject whatever good is there in the other alternatives. It wastes our time and energy trying to compete, market and sell rather than focus on co-operating and co-creating.

And it excludes — severely so because our first past the post system means that about 20% of the country’s total population can decide who will ‘rule’ the 100%.

So while being true to the spirit of democracy (which we are definitely not being), we need to innovate and find better ways — else we will be stuck with this suboptimal system of selection and decision making.

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