Before we get going: obligatory buried in work/no time/sorry for not blogging/I will do better/album coming soon statement.
If I were to tell you the current political landscape is a mess, I would be telling you nothing that my nine year old doesn't already know. And if I were to expand on my personal politics (which, as I age, get more and more radical), I would probably only be helping to establish/adding to my FBI file. Besides, I'm still buried in work, so I will stick to something simpler: how to fix everything.
This morning, I ran across a pretty cool video on ranked voting:
It's hard for me to disagree with anything in this video, but it did inspire me to sketch out a plan for improving our sucky world of politics and elections. Some of these do require a non-contagious world to work, but we could filter them in one by one.Ready?
- Automatic vote registration. You turn 18, you are registered. It's gotta be easier for people to participate [source].
- Election day becomes a national holiday, and businesses that do not close are required to give employees a few hours off when the polls are open [source].
- A playground with supervision attached to every polling place. Having to look after the kids should not be an excuse.
- Fail to vote? Then you are three times as likely to be called for jury duty.
- Early voting is mandated across the board. Everyone should have at least a month to vote [source].
- No questions absentee ballots. So far, no one has come up with any real evidence of organized voter fraud [source] [source] except maybe for the Republican Party in California putting up fake ballot drop-off boxes [source]. Note: it probably won't help them.
- Ranked voting. Having more than two parties is in everyone's interest [source]. We are not a binary society, so there's no reason our politics should be binary.
- Codify into law the common sense realization that corporations are not people [source].
- Term limits are pretty silly. If someone is doing a bad job, they will be voted out if elections are fair and equitable, and if people really have choice [source]. Saying, "you can only do two terms" is like saying, "sorry, we don't want people with experience."
- Electoral college? Sorry, you are too antiquated and stupid to survive. Nobody really liked you in the first place [source].
- A fair, codified order of succession. I was actually shocked to hear there's actually debate on if we have this. Specifically, if both the president and vice president were incapacitated, it's not clear whether the Speaker of the House can actually head the executive branch [source] [source]. There is the Presidential Succession Law, but there is debate on whether that's actually constitutional [source].
(ps: did you know that if a source is behind a paywall, you can probably open it up in your broswer's incognito mode?)
