New Elections Summary, Unfit Ideas
As promised on Friday, today will have a short summary of that update.
Changes to be made in the electoral process:
1. Criminalize the act of non-voting, to eliminate apathy. The people may not love it, but for damn sure they're gonna feel some way about it, and that's all that really matters.
2. Add new features to the ballot including candidate headshots and bios, and 'Abstain' and 'None of these Guys' choices for every election.
3. Make it so that candidates must sign on the dotted line to make their campaign promises legally binding. The only way they'd be allowed to reneg on their promises would be extenuating circumstances, and the Supreme Court would have to decide that.
4. Get rid of the electoral college completely. As I said last week, it was designed for remote representatives to be able to pick the two guys who would be overseeing national business. Now, of course, they are both superfluous and vestigial, and should be removed outright.
5. Have run-offs instead pluralities. This is obvious and actually done when electors are concerned, but it needs to be done on a national level, completely determined by the people alone and as a whole.
6. Change election time to the first or second weekend in November, have the polls open from midnight Saturday morning to midnight Monday morning, and call it an election holiday; this way, no one has an excuse about being indisposed.
7. Ban all pre-close national election reporting. Wait until Hawai'i is closed and then you can start telling us who won before calling the race 'too close to call.' Stupid media…
8. The price, whatever it turns out to be, will be worth it. You can't spend too much on ensuring our freedom.
Here are a few that I left out, ideas that won't make the cut in Friday's Amendment Proposal, mostly because they can't work:
Standardized National Ballot System
This is pretty easy to understand; if you're going to have a national system of improved ballots, you're going to need some form of national ballot.
Frankly, all this crap about 'chads' and 'pencils' and 'eVoting terminals' is buncombe; we need one standard voting method, nationally. Since we need the states to agree to this, a federal law regarding it would probably be unconstitutional, so we'd likely have to go with a separate amendment for this, which is a whole other bag of hammers you don't want to get into.
Party/Ideology Votes
My idea with this is, generally, that with several candidates running with the same basic platform, you get a split bill, so you might want to just count the votes for the ideologies first, and the individuals second.
Of course, this would be impossible; you'd have to let the national committees set up the platforms, and then you'd get moderates and gradients… just another big mess that's better left alone.
National 'Vote-Anywhere' System
The idea here is that you could go to any jurisdiction and vote there, your name being taken off a national list as having voted.
The problems are obvious: it'd be too easy to steal an election that way, and you'd have to arrange a national electronic voting system, in order to get the elector's referendums up to him. Just a silly idea.
Home Voting Terminals
Like, little eVoting machines, the size of AC control units in your home, with dedicated lines to server nodes on a national network, so you never miss an election (because it beeps until you enter your choice), and you never have an excuse for missing out.
I thought of this a few years ago, but I've decided against it, since the problems are many and obvious. Maybe in 200 years this will happen. The technology exists, sure, but the infrastructure doesn't, and it'd require electronic voting, national ID cards, all sorts of rotten garbage and calls of 'invasion of privacy' by everyone, including me, and I came up with the idea. That'd be pretty Orwellian, actually.
Those were the ideas that couldn't make the cut, obviously. The 8 general topics above those will all be covered in Friday's update.
Changes to be made in the electoral process:
1. Criminalize the act of non-voting, to eliminate apathy. The people may not love it, but for damn sure they're gonna feel some way about it, and that's all that really matters.
2. Add new features to the ballot including candidate headshots and bios, and 'Abstain' and 'None of these Guys' choices for every election.
3. Make it so that candidates must sign on the dotted line to make their campaign promises legally binding. The only way they'd be allowed to reneg on their promises would be extenuating circumstances, and the Supreme Court would have to decide that.
4. Get rid of the electoral college completely. As I said last week, it was designed for remote representatives to be able to pick the two guys who would be overseeing national business. Now, of course, they are both superfluous and vestigial, and should be removed outright.
5. Have run-offs instead pluralities. This is obvious and actually done when electors are concerned, but it needs to be done on a national level, completely determined by the people alone and as a whole.
6. Change election time to the first or second weekend in November, have the polls open from midnight Saturday morning to midnight Monday morning, and call it an election holiday; this way, no one has an excuse about being indisposed.
7. Ban all pre-close national election reporting. Wait until Hawai'i is closed and then you can start telling us who won before calling the race 'too close to call.' Stupid media…
8. The price, whatever it turns out to be, will be worth it. You can't spend too much on ensuring our freedom.
Here are a few that I left out, ideas that won't make the cut in Friday's Amendment Proposal, mostly because they can't work:
Standardized National Ballot System
This is pretty easy to understand; if you're going to have a national system of improved ballots, you're going to need some form of national ballot.
Frankly, all this crap about 'chads' and 'pencils' and 'eVoting terminals' is buncombe; we need one standard voting method, nationally. Since we need the states to agree to this, a federal law regarding it would probably be unconstitutional, so we'd likely have to go with a separate amendment for this, which is a whole other bag of hammers you don't want to get into.
Party/Ideology Votes
My idea with this is, generally, that with several candidates running with the same basic platform, you get a split bill, so you might want to just count the votes for the ideologies first, and the individuals second.
Of course, this would be impossible; you'd have to let the national committees set up the platforms, and then you'd get moderates and gradients… just another big mess that's better left alone.
National 'Vote-Anywhere' System
The idea here is that you could go to any jurisdiction and vote there, your name being taken off a national list as having voted.
The problems are obvious: it'd be too easy to steal an election that way, and you'd have to arrange a national electronic voting system, in order to get the elector's referendums up to him. Just a silly idea.
Home Voting Terminals
Like, little eVoting machines, the size of AC control units in your home, with dedicated lines to server nodes on a national network, so you never miss an election (because it beeps until you enter your choice), and you never have an excuse for missing out.
I thought of this a few years ago, but I've decided against it, since the problems are many and obvious. Maybe in 200 years this will happen. The technology exists, sure, but the infrastructure doesn't, and it'd require electronic voting, national ID cards, all sorts of rotten garbage and calls of 'invasion of privacy' by everyone, including me, and I came up with the idea. That'd be pretty Orwellian, actually.
Those were the ideas that couldn't make the cut, obviously. The 8 general topics above those will all be covered in Friday's update.
posted by J. E Jansen at 10.8.04
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home