The Election Game Show

It may be too late to change anything for this year’s election, but let’s see if we can make the 2016 election go a little bit better. Here are some ideas that will make the elections fairer, more fun, more fact-based and less discriminating against third parties.

First big change: no more human moderators. You may have heard the news about a year ago that IBM made a supercomputer, Watson, that can understand human language.  Watson should be given the questions to ask the candidates. Not only will a computer be completely impartial, but Watson would also be able to fact-check everything that each candidate said in real-time. How can debates based on fact be a bad thing?

Now for the Presidential Election Game Show. The show works like this. Allow the third parties to participate in the debates. This simultaneously makes the election fairer, and makes it appeal to more of the population. All the presidential candidates, consisting of a few Democrats, a few Republicans, one or two from the Green Party, and one or two Libertarians, would live together in a big house. They would compete in one debate every week on a different topic, and the audience could vote them off like American Idol.

To increase viewership even further, celebrities could be brought in to ask the questions (while still being fact-checked by Watson). All the candidates living together would spawn all sorts of drama and interactions that would give viewers better insight into what kind of people the candidates actually are.
There could even be a True Life segment where two contestants are locked in a room together for a few hours to talk.

We would get to see Romney punch Todd Akin in the face for almost ruining his campaign, we could see Biden use “malarky” in everyday conversation, and we would see Newt lose his hair over not being able to buy Tiffany jewelry. Obama would be on the bench press, saying things like, “before I talk about how I get healthy, I want to talk about what being healthy means to this country and its people.” Now that is a show I would watch.

We let the audience vote until there are only two candidates left, and then people vote just like they would in a normal election. The game show idea takes all money and super PACs out of the election, citizens are more informed, and let’s be honest…how awesome would it be to hear American Idol’s Simon tell candidates, “That was utterly awful!”?HUDSON LOFCHIE can be reached at science@theaggie.org.