The United States Electoral reform theory thread.

I'm going to disagree with, well, everything you (not Styphon) said, but I give you points for at least trying.

Your first point carries a problem that makes it completely impossible to take on: campaigning takes too long. Presidential campaigns last about 2 years (a year and a half at the minimum), so that means that a president would now be campaigning for 2/3 of his term rather than 1/2. Senators can get a lot done since they are effectively in office for 5 years and the House runs perfectly fine with 2-year terms. If you shorten the House to one-year terms, when is the off-season? When can the representative come back to the home base to learn about the constituents and go back to fight for what is needed?

Campaigning is the main reason we only have politicians anymore and very few statesmen.

You can't do much to shorten the time between the election and taking office. Maybe a couple weeks, but it is customary with anything to be able sort one's affairs before leaving the previous job. If a current mayor wins a governorship, it takes time to turn the affairs of a city over to a new person. Plus, it takes time to prepare and there is very little done in lame-duck sessions anyway.

The vice president should never, ever be the person who finishes #2. For one, while the president is the big dog, the VP does have quite a bit of influence, a seat at the table. When the president can bring along someone who might be a very good mind (who wouldn't leave the Senate just to be an adviser), why deny that opportunity? And what of a 2nd term president? Throw out the current VP because the opposition threw another person at him who got beat?

Further, the guy who loses the election by vote, popular or otherwise, shouldn't automatically get to be president if the president dies. He lost for a reason. There is no one in the line of succession who is not either 1) voted into their position by the public and then appointed to the position by fellow elected peers or 2) hired by the President and then approved by Congress. If that became the case, the #2 man for the presidency would also be the only person on the list not chosen by anyone to be in the succession.

I am for some kind of, I dunno, campaigning caps, but I don't really have any good way to design it. There is a huge discrepancy between the amount of money corporations spend on elections and the amount citizens spend, meaning that if there is influence, it doesn't necessarily go to people. I find that to be the biggest problem. But there's a free speech issue here, and we've trampled on it quite a bit already. If a candidate is given money, why shouldn't he get to spread his message? Why shouldn't someone get to spread a message for him or attack an opponent?

We are where we are because Americans just don't care. I'm sure that people who want to serve their country, state, city, whatever, would much rather have honest debates in public forums then just sling mud through TV ads. But the fact of the matter is that you can do a debate or two for the presidency, but after that you've got no audience. The gubernatorial debate here was on public access and the audio was so bad you could barely hear it. If the American public cared more, we'd get more of that and less crap.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by Minion

I've always thought that we could do without a congress these days and just go full-fledged democracy. The growing pains would be severe of course and there are downsides, but the current system isn't perfect, and it just seems right that everyone's opinion would actually count.

Voting on bills and laws is one thing, writing them is a-whole-nother, and that's usually what Congress also does and the ones they don't write, they fix. I also do not trust for one second that the general public would pay enough attention to the bills. The people writing them would throw millions of loopholes into everything that a congressman would notice and vote against where the public would hear the one keyword of the issue and vote based on that.

I know that senators don't read everything, but they have trusted aides who do. Plus there would be no end to the deluge that we just saw at election time. Rather than having a dozen or so propositions every couple years and a few on the inbetweens, you'd have votes every single day.

Originally Posted by The Dopefish

Campaigning shouldn't be an issue. If you do a good job, that's your campaign.

The simple answer to that is: 1) the guy running against you has to campaign and you can't not answer and expect to win and 2) Americans don't pay enough attention to what is going on to know what their own senators are doing without being told.

Plus, campaigns are good because it forces candidates to go out and spread messages to the general public.

There's nowhere I can't reach.