General Elections: Reform

So we talked about reforming primaries and caucuses yesterday, but what about the general election.  If you read yesterday's issue "Primary and Caucus: Reform" you would probably think that that is a great idea for general election reform too (assuming you read it and that you liked it).  But alas, that is not optimal for a general election.  Yes, voting via the internet would work, but unlike the aforementioned proposal where the site allowed you to change your vote all the way up and to the day before a cutoff date for a particular candidate, the reform I propose here would not have such a luxury.  So what would this reform entail?

For one, Election Day would be moved to Saturday to ensure that people who have to vote by the traditional ballot system would have greater access to the polls.  With respect to voting via the internet, if the States allow it (States make the rules on how votes are to be cast or counted, while the Federal government looks to prevent corruption) it too will be limited to a single day.  In both instances the day can be first Saturday of November which will also double as a holiday that mandates all businesses and government offices save those implementing the election will be off from work.  So while this reform will not completely eliminate the need for absentee ballots or even early voting it will help with the eventual removal of these potential sources of corruption (sometimes these ballots are mysteriously found when an election is too close to call).  If using an online voting system, your driver's license number, or your social security number which aids in showing where you live and thus your eligibility to vote will be required to log in along with a series of challenge questions to insure that you are in fact who you say you are.  The Federal, State and local governments will all conduct their elections on this same day to ensure maximum turnout.  Also, special elections (where people retire before their terms are up, or otherwise removed from office) would be eliminated wherever possible so as to not disrupt this system.  An example would be having a one of two U.S. Senators leave office, thus rather than one being appointed by the governor of their State as a temporary replacement the other sitting Senator would get two votes instead of one.  Another possible example to be rid of special elections is if a local legislator is arrested and forcibly removed, if there is no votes scheduled between the legislators removal and the election, then no special election will be allowed to take place.  These are obviously two hypotheticals, but the idea is to keep the choices of who gets elected in the hands of the people and prevents as much influence by the parties and the governments in that special election as possible.

Another potential reform is a runoff election.  Say there is more than two candidates who are eligible to run after July 31st.  As such a series of runoff elections would take place on the first Saturday of September and October where candidates with less than 10% of the vote will be dropped after the first round of voting, then only the top two candidates with the two highest percentages of votes will be allowed to stay in the race after the second round of voting if there is still more than two candidates left by this point in time.  These runoffs will be based on total number of votes received, while the final vote will use the traditional Electoral College system.  Thus we almost completely eliminate the chances of a third group running in the General election and thus siphoning off votes from a potentially better candidate.  

You may be wondering why I do not remove the Electoral College.  Simple, the Electoral College acts as a filter in my opinion to prevent tyranny of the majority.  While it is fine to have a majority vote in a runoff election, we as people are prone to rash actions and judgments.  As such, the Electoral College helps to filter that out as each State has its own population sizes and cultures.  So you could say that it prevents a tyranny of the majority by the voters of New York, California and other coastal States which host a majority of the population of the United States as compared to the smaller States which even together may not even have a population size coming anywhere close to that of New York's and California's combined.  Basically, if we did our election system by majority rule the Candidates would visit exclusively New York, Texas, California, and Florida (and maybe a few others) thus winning because of the vast population sizes of these States.  In short, you would disenfranchise every voter in Alaska, North Dakota and more.  Therefore it acts as a balancer even if the winner does not achieve a victory in the popular vote.

Conclusion:  These are some basic reforms, but of course some will need a Constitutional change, and others like internet voting and making Election Day a national holiday take simple but only semi hard to achieve votes in Congress, and the State and local governments.  So about half the reforms here are feasible as is.  Any case, hope you like the reforms and personally I am in favor of internet cast ballots that you can cast anywhere in the world that there is an internet connection.  Some States have already begun to move in that direction and I look forward to seeing how far they will take it.