Just wondering about the idea, what if stack exchange platform would be used for candidates to answer citizens questions.
Some changes would need to be made to the platform.
- Only eligible voters can ask questions.
- Only eligible voters can vote on questions and answers
- Only candidates can answer questions.
- Community moderators would merge duplicates but there should be limitations on what can be done.
- No need for "accept" feature, people can vote for their favourite answer
just a few basic rules of top of my head, details of the system are not part of the question
That obviously poses the problem of user verification.
If we ignore/solve the user verification problem. What would it take to convince politicians to actually use it?
The idea came to me recently as I read an AMA with one politician and he answered only the questions that had a positive answer and anything inconvenient was completely ignored. Often debates are being accused of having prepared questions. Additionally, if you watch videos analysing debates, often they focus on candidates charisma and wits rather than their answers to decide who "won".
It would truly allow anyone to ask questions and highlight ignored issues if a question with a lot of votes has no answers.
Possibly there could be accusations of hackers manipulating scores and other content but I think that is a weak argument to avoid answering a question if any politician ever cared.