Voting combine

The NFL draft is one of my favorite events of the year. For those unfamiliar, it's where NFL teams pick from former college players. Before the draft is the NFL Combine: a battery of tests performed on the top 80-90% of players most likely to be selected in the draft. Independent testing provides physical attributes (height, weight, wingspan, etc), physical skill measurements (40 yard dash, vertical jump, etc) and a medical evaluation. Most of the press goes to the first two groups of data, but the teams care most about the latter (because they watch hours of tape on players, so the actual numbers from these tests aren't all that meaningful). Sometimes an otherwise highly ranked prospect has an unknown chronic medical issue, or gets busted by a drug test, or is just in the process of healing from a known surgery/injury and that progress is evaluated. Teams can then factor in this data when deciding if a player is worth an early pick.

Occasionally in presidential campaigns, a candidate's health comes up as an issue (is Ron Paul too old? is McCain too old? is Chris Christie too fat?). Perhaps we need a congressional combine (or call it something else ... ). Candidates would be tested by an independent panel on awareness of facts around current talking points, given a test to establish roughly where they fall on the political spectrum and given physicals and assigned a health risk score on some scale (from "totally fine" to "imminent risk of blown pupil"). This would go into their portfolio of data along with their observed behavior and voters can decide who to back based on slightly more complete and less manipulated information.