Designing a personal voting guide: A model for electoral deliberation online

Evidence from the Oregon Citizens’ Initiative Review (CIR) shows the efficacy of a deliberative minipublic serving as a trusted information proxy for an electorate that votes on initiatives and referenda. This paper builds on that model by envisioning a decentralized online process that offers the function of the CIR without the planning and expense of convening the minipublic itself. The resulting model, which we call the Personal Voting Guide, draws on experiments in digital deliberation and provides a scalable process for generating key findings and pro/con arguments on referenda and initiatives, as well as guidance for choosing among parties or candidates. The proposed model addresses the same challenges that inspired the CIR by ensuring trustworthy, high-quality information and motivating voters to use that information before completing their ballots. It also emphasizes the potential for users to customize their voting guides on ballot issues, candidates, and parties based on varied political values, source perceptions, and tolerance for information complexity.