Do you live in IL-05? Want to vote in online poll?

Proviso Probe is going to try something new in covering the IL-05 race. At least, I think it's new.

I'm going to ask people who live in the district to vote in a weekly online election. But it's going to be a ranked voting system called Condorcet voting. Proviso Probe will use Condorcet Internet Voting Service.

This will show a measure of strength for the different candidates. This is not a poll of likely voters or registered voters, so it shouldn't be construed as predicting the election results.

However, I do think it will be useful to voters who pay extra attention. They will be able to see which candidates are stronger and weaker among the voters who pay extra attention. The Democrats have a particularly large field with over a dozen candidates, but the Greens and Republicans also have large fields too.

When a citizen goes to vote, s/he can only cast one vote. By having information about the preferences of the activists and voters who pay extra attention an individual can better decide which candidates are truly viable. This is probably useful for both voting and deciding which candidate to support by volunteering or contributing.

When I get emails from 20 voters from a political party, I will create the poll. In your email please provide your name and zip code. I don't think the software lets me inspect individual votes, but if it does I won't. The email addresses are needed to prevent stuffing the ballot box. Each email address only votes once. The names are a check that people actually live in the district. And the zip code is to see how representative the sample of voters is.

If you want to participate, email your name, zip code and email address from which you will be voting to RadioNyberg circled “a” Yahoo spot c0m.

The advantage of Condorcet voting is that it creates a matrix of comparing all candidates against each other. You'll find out how many voters prefer Victor Forys to each of the other Democratic candidates.