YouCut program

[Berserker]

To paraphrase, you go to the GOP Youcut program and you vote on which of the 5 programs displayed that time (they change every week) you want them to cut. They say that they will then put the winner to a vote in the house and try to get that program cut.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,592742,00.html

In itself, not a bad idea, but I see a big flaw in this. The flaw is that you only have 5 programs at a time to choose from and you don't have an option of saying that you want to keep them should you like them. Secondly, they get to pick which 5 to display at any one time which makes the entire process very biased. Say even if everyone likes the programs, it only takes 1 single vote on one of the 5 programs for it to "win" which means they will try to have the house vote to cut that program. I think this leaves a whole lot of room for abuse and misrepresentation. I think you will hear a lot of "the american people have spoken" sentence based on this which will not be representative.

It would however be a cool program if they implemented it right. OR even better yet, if some non-partisan group (not the GOP or the DEMS) would implemnent this, give more choices and also give a choice for if you wanted to keep the listed programs.

Also, i'm not sure if they implemented any way to distinguish between distinct votes and the same guy voting over and over. They are using texts for this so maybe they don't count the same phone number twice, but again this is ready adn ripe for abuse and misrepresentation.