Subject: Web Polls for PO

From: mittnox@y...
Date: Sat, 02 Jun 2001 23:42:07 -0000

Hey. I inadvertantly posted this on another Yahoo! Group first, so 
sorry if you're seeing it twice.

There are several sites which allow you to create your own web-polls.

What if we had a site separate from anything having to do with L-
Nomic where we set up web polls for random people to vote on?

We could have each poll relate to an L-Nomic proposal, but phrase the 
question so that people would answer as if they were voting on the 
real-life equivalent.

ie. "Would you support a law which increased government spending on 
healthcare?"

x - Greatly support
x -
x -
x -
x - Greatly oppose

We could advertise the web-poll site extensively on Usenet, register 
it with search engines, etc. so that it got hits. (As a matter of 
fact, we could even base the population of our "realm" on the number 
of hits the web-poll site got, if we wanted to.)

We could leave the polls up for a week or so on each issue to get a 
good sampling of PO and to dilute the effect of MPs voting on the 
websites.

I'll whip up a sample and try to get some hits this evening, as a 
demonstration of what I mean.

Mittnox

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From: Henry Towsner <htowsner@s...>
Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 17:02:19 -0700

I see one major problem with this. How do we make it 
responsive to what we're doing? If we pass a fantastic health care 
law but the US passes a horrible one, and then there's a proposal to 
repeal it, our populace should want to keep it while the voters would 
probably want to repeal it.
-- 
Henry Towsner <htowsner@s...>

Majority, n.: That quality that distinguishes a crime from a law

---

From: mittnox@y...
Date: Sun, 03 Jun 2001 06:07:04 -0000

Well, there are a couple of ways to think about this.

We could word a question hypothetically: "Imagine the federal 
government put into action a comprehensive health care plan that 
covered everything, allowed you to choose your own doctor, and was 
totally self-funding (or an analogy for whatever we actually manage 
to come up with in the game). Then imagine that a bill was presented 
to do away with that plan. Would you:

x - strongly favor doing away with the healthcare plan.
x -
x - 
x - 
x - strongly favor keeping the healthcare plan.

Or, we could take the cynical viewpoint that public opinion is not 
actually swayed by HOW GOOD a law is, but by the spin the issue gets. 
We'd then modify the actual poll results to account for our use of 
political capital.

Mittnox