Many US citizens are dissatisfied with the current 2016 POTUS candidates, so (as a theoretical exercise) how would HN design a site that allows US citizens to share their picks and their "WHYs" to surface the most desirable leaders this country would back?<p>Why do this? I am a US citizen and I like solutions more than angry people. If we can find an objective approach together – let’s try. Update: we’ve acquired the www.potuswritein.com domain and can push an open-source or open-design site out if this works.<p>Latest goes here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EgZYBgu035yYfDpm4-aPm6vGkAS_iq-mNnVuaQ5B_ao/ . This is not a voting-booth alternative or an attempt to push any political agenda. This is just an over-designed public poll to get objective suggestions.<p>1.Only one submission per US Citizen. Options:
- Only one vote per ip + browser + os
- Request some piece of identification (a DL number + State; or a phone number + DOB + Place of Birth?;<p>2.Allow every voter to submit up to 10 different candidates in one submission. As results come in and get calculated, the site would visualize every scenario and be filterable (show first picks only, show people in most lists, etc).<p>3.Allow free-flowing text up to 100 words as to why they recommend each candidate. When you click on a candidate, you get to see all the WHYs as well.<p>4.After one round of voting produces a set of candidates, do we enable people to do a second round to narrow down the surfaced?<p>5.Once the voting is complete and results finalized all personal info will be deleted and voters will be replaced with unique ids.<p>6.If the site gets a denial-of-service attack or if rigging is suspected the site will share data about each incident the main page and/or another public account.<p>7.Any votes and processing will NOT be reported in real-time. Voters will get confirmation when votes are processed.<p>8.There will be a donation box for operational costs.
I don't think this is going to produce anything worthwhile (much like online comment sections never produce much that's worthwhile), but I wanted to respond to a couple of your thoughts:<p>> <i>Only one vote per ip + browser + os</i><p>You could do that with cookies, but it would be absolutely trivial to circumvent. Someone could submit votes as fast as your server could process them.<p>> <i>Request some piece of identification (a DL number + State; or a phone number + DOB + Place of Birth?</i><p>This will weed out people who are cautious about their privacy, and it also creates a huge ethical responsibility for you. When you're storing sensitive info (like political views) along with PII, you better do a damn good job of securing it. Even though I've been in this industry for 20 years, I still don't do this kind of thing myself -- I hire a security expert to audit my work. Are you willing to do that?<p>Your only real hope of a one-vote-per-person system is Facebook login. There's nothing else on the web currently that works as well, since you can't legally verify things like DL numbers.