We live in a world where everyone is digitally connected and social media influencing is at an all time high and to top it, the IQ of the average voter is less than a few cents. All of this doesn't sound like the right combination, especially for a political system like democracy where largest head count determines who the winner is.
All it takes in today's digital age is a few social media campaigns to change the public opinion in one's favor (or against the enemy's). In other words, a PR circus is all our election system has been reduced to. The one with the largest pockets to influence in this game wins the battle, its as simple as that.
Now, of course there are various election commissions or committees in various countries and even the social networking websites themselves who keep making a farce of "curbing the hate speech", "suspending the troll accounts", etc. every now and then but does that really change anything? Think about it, doesn't the influencing still keep on happening irrespective of all that?
Maybe the current system was the right way to go about a hundred years ago when there wasn't the Internet and influencing people wasn't so easy and the average IQ was quite a few dollars worth and not just a few cents. But today, elections are just a sort of ritual because the numbers or head counts that can make the difference could be reached and influenced toward a certain direction by merely approaching the right PR agency. That's why we need an election system overhaul, we need a stronger and more robust system which is not so easy to manipulate.
Let the voter be educated and informed
A voter must be both educated and informed about the election process and how the result is going to affect their constituency or ward. She must also know some basic political theory of how the system works in the country and practical knowledge of things like who the candidates for representation are, their backgrounds, achievements, criminal record (if they have any), etc. Without possessing this know how, it feels fraudulent to let that voter go ahead and cast vote to a ballot that will shape the fates of districts, states and even the entire nation (and by extrapolation even the whole world). Having mandatory weekly or monthly classes for imparting this education is a great idea in this direction.
When average stops giving results, most scientists and statisticians turn to "weighted average"
This is a common phenomenon in statistics and other social sciences. Inflation, for example, is never a simple average of the prices of all goods and services in an economy. It is typically assigned weights based on its market share. For example, food and groceries are given much higher weights in inflation calculation than say Mercedez Benz cars or Rolex watches. If the price of Benz or Rolex doubles, people might still be affected but those people will be minuscule in number compared to those getting affected if veggies or rice price were to double. Thus the importance of weights or weighted average. The same can be applied to elections too. An informed voter's vote must have a much higher weight compared to a non-informed one's.
Influencing, Rigging, Manipulation, etc. will continue as long as it is allowed to affect election results
News has become too opinionated, too polarized and too toxic today, it feels as though every news channel out there and even every blog, website and social network out there are all crying in high decibels in a bid to sell their narrative. "Buy this and shove down your throats" they cry and given enough decibels and repetition combined with a few cents' worth IQ, it even has a good chance of giving results. Yes, they keep influencing because it actually works! Change the system, just change the rules so that only the most informed voters (who can see through the influence farce) can affect the election outcome and the influencing will stop happening automatically. Because who will send salesmen to a market where advertisement has zero results!
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