I like to start these articles by identifying problems, but when it comes to elections, it's such a list!
1) All votes cast in elections for offices federal, state, or local, shall be recorded in a written, durable form readable by a healthy human without mechanical assistance. This record shall be presented to the voter for verification before the vote is cast, whereupon that voter shall have the option to recast their vote. The federal government shall define standards for this process, and fund the acquisition of necessary equipment.
2) Ballots shall not indicate the party affiliation of any candidate.
3) In the event that voters are presented with a ballot listing the names of candidates, the order of those names shall be randomized on each ballot.
- Congress with single-digit approval ratings and 90%+ re-election rates
- Entrenched political class
- No response to the desires of the people as a whole
- Winner-take-all electoral vote distribution
- Disenfranchises the minority in the state, who have no effect on the election outcome
- Heavily-gerrymandered single-winner congressional districts
- Again, disenfranchises the minority, who get no representation
- Since the minority party has no effect, candidates pander to the extreme of the majority party
- High barriers to ballot access
- Locked-in two-party system with no chance of competition (and thus improvement!)
- Ballot design gives advantages to some candidates
- Order has an effect on odds of winning
- Party recognition on ballot further entrenches party-based politics
- No paper trail
- Reduces voter confidence in the system
- Can't effectively recount votes
- Dominance of money in elections
- Distorts system; some people have more influence than others
1) All votes cast in elections for offices federal, state, or local, shall be recorded in a written, durable form readable by a healthy human without mechanical assistance. This record shall be presented to the voter for verification before the vote is cast, whereupon that voter shall have the option to recast their vote. The federal government shall define standards for this process, and fund the acquisition of necessary equipment.
2) Ballots shall not indicate the party affiliation of any candidate.
3) In the event that voters are presented with a ballot listing the names of candidates, the order of those names shall be randomized on each ballot.
4) In no case shall the signatures of more than 100 registered voters be required for a candidate to be listed on the ballot for any election, nor shall fees be charged for such listing.
I believe the emphasis on how Presidential elections operate is unfortunate, as there are tens of thousands of other elections in this country every year, all of which have very similar problems. However, any list of proposed amendments for the people to consider would be incomplete without one eliminating the electoral college.
5a) The President shall be elected by popular vote. The electoral college is nullified.
If not that, I'd suggest an alternative:
5b) The electoral votes of each state shall be distributed proportionally to each candidate according to the popular vote within that state.
Nor would the list be complete without mention of term limits. Incumbents clearly have tremendous advantage when seeking reelection, meaning the election is not a level playing field. However, we also are not well-served to throw out years of governing experience without hope of recovery. There are a few possible approaches to this, which I list in order of my increasing preference:
6a) No person shall hold the office of Senator more than twice, or of Representative more than six times.
6b) States shall have the right to set term limits for their Representatives or Senators.
6c) No person shall hold the office of Senator, Representative, or President twice in succession, but may otherwise serve as many times as elected.
Now, the fun ones!
Gerrymandering is essentially a problem of incentives. There is an inherent conflict of interest, with power on one hand, and fairness of elections on the other. Power always wins. This leads to single-party districts, causing candidates in those districts to pander to the extreme wing of the majority party, effectively disenfranchising the minority party.
If you let politicians redraw their own districts, then obviously they'll use that power to benefit themselves. The only solution is to take that power away.
7) All electoral districts shall be drawn by a politically-neutral group of at least five people, none of whom are elected officials. This body shall be politically neutral. The states shall have the power to define the selection process for this group.
Personally, I'm a big fan of multi-member districts and proportional representation, which could eliminate gerrymandering concerns entirely. I would hold that use of such is something that's best decided on a state level. However, states presently do not have that option. Federal law prevents states from having multi-member districts.
8) States shall have the right to determine whether to use single-member or multi-member House districts, so long as each voter's weight is approximately equal.
I also hold that states should have more control over their legislators.
9) States shall have the right to hold recall elections for their Representatives or Senators, and to determine processes to fill vacancies between elections.
The influence of money over our elections is undeniable, and undeniably undemocratic. The very idea that one person or group should be able to influence the outcome of an election more than another, simply because one of them has more money than the other, is an indisputable distortion of how any democracy should work. And with the Citizens United ruling, the Supreme Court has gutted what few restrictions there were on the problem. Either Congress should have the power to regulate campaign contributions, or election campaigns should be publicly funded. See Move to Amend for more.
10a) Congress shall have the power to regulate donations and spending on federal election campaigns. The states shall have such power over election campaigns for all other offices.
10b) All elections shall be publicly funded; spending private money on an election, unless that money is equally shared among all candidates for that office, shall be forbidden by law.
Finally, and most fundamentally, the entire concept of plurality voting is flawed. If there are more than two candidates, you get vote-splitting, which throws the election to an unpopular candidate. That's ultimately why we have a two-party system, and why we have primaries and runoffs. There is no law that says plurality voting must be used. Nobody ever chose it as the best voting system; we simply use it because we always have. Switching to approval voting would be cheaper, simpler, more democratic, and give vastly better results in every measurable way.
(While there are other voting systems to choose from, the only one that could be argued to be better than approval voting is range voting, and it's far more complicated and expensive to implement. IRV is more commonly suggested, but harder to implement, more complex to execute, and technically inferior on a number of counts. IRV isn't even monotone!)
11) All public elections at any level of government shall be held using approval voting.
The influence of money over our elections is undeniable, and undeniably undemocratic. The very idea that one person or group should be able to influence the outcome of an election more than another, simply because one of them has more money than the other, is an indisputable distortion of how any democracy should work. And with the Citizens United ruling, the Supreme Court has gutted what few restrictions there were on the problem. Either Congress should have the power to regulate campaign contributions, or election campaigns should be publicly funded. See Move to Amend for more.
10a) Congress shall have the power to regulate donations and spending on federal election campaigns. The states shall have such power over election campaigns for all other offices.
10b) All elections shall be publicly funded; spending private money on an election, unless that money is equally shared among all candidates for that office, shall be forbidden by law.
Finally, and most fundamentally, the entire concept of plurality voting is flawed. If there are more than two candidates, you get vote-splitting, which throws the election to an unpopular candidate. That's ultimately why we have a two-party system, and why we have primaries and runoffs. There is no law that says plurality voting must be used. Nobody ever chose it as the best voting system; we simply use it because we always have. Switching to approval voting would be cheaper, simpler, more democratic, and give vastly better results in every measurable way.
(While there are other voting systems to choose from, the only one that could be argued to be better than approval voting is range voting, and it's far more complicated and expensive to implement. IRV is more commonly suggested, but harder to implement, more complex to execute, and technically inferior on a number of counts. IRV isn't even monotone!)
11) All public elections at any level of government shall be held using approval voting.
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