“I actually would favor a voting system, in which there were no political designations on the ballot, where you actually had to know what the person believed. You had to know how they voted in the past.”
That second part, which you specifically ignored, would, by definition, require a test at the polls. Please explain why you support a test at the polls.
You wrote:
Dr Carson is proposing the idea of removing a candidate’s party affiliation from the ballot to prevent voters oblivious to the world around them from voting on a straight party-line basis for ANY political party. Which will in turn hopefully encourage them to further look into important issues facing their state and nation. It has been tried on the municipal level in a few states and I have never heard the complaint of order discrimination by name. Whether communities will in practice educate themselves as an act of participatory democracy (not test, obviously) as he is assuming on the most basic level is the real question.
There is no way to literally force citizens to know what is on a candidate platform. Hell, the candidates themselves have enough trouble making their own positions clear. He is simply promoting the reform as one in which voters will take the opportunity to better identify where they and the candidates identify on the ideological spectrum so that a more democratic and more transparent process ensues.
I also believe that voting should be a process whereby the candidates themselves are the people to which we elect, not the banner under which they run but the banner should at least be acknowledged on the ballot, as they are the organization that backed the candidate and got them to where they are. :)